FBI Director Claims Iranian Hackers Attempted to Target Boston Hospital Last Year to Disrupt Services

Hackers sponsored by the Iranian authorities final 12 months tried a “despicable” cyber assault in opposition to Boston Youngsters’s Hospital that threatened to disrupt providers to sufferers, FBI Director Christopher Wray mentioned on Wednesday.

Wray, in a speech delivered at a convention hosted by Boston Faculty, detailed the incident as he warned in regards to the rising menace cyber assaults sponsored by nation states like Iran, Russia and China pose to firms and US infrastructure.

“We received a report from certainly one of our intelligence companions indicating Boston Youngsters’s was about to be focused, and understanding the urgency of the scenario, the cyber squad in our Boston subject workplace raced out to inform the hospital,” Wray mentioned.

The FBI mentioned it contacted the hospital in August 2021, and Wray mentioned officers had been capable of shortly get the nationally famend youngsters’s hospital the knowledge it wanted to “cease the hazard instantly” and mitigate the menace.

“Fast actions by everybody concerned, particularly on the hospital, protected each the community and the sick children that rely upon it,” Wray mentioned in essentially the most in depth disclosure by US authorities of the incident.

Wray in March mentioned that Iranian-sponsored hackers had in June 2021 compromised an unnamed youngsters’s hospital.

Boston Youngsters’s Hospital, a 395-bed facility, in a press release confirmed that the FBI and its employees had “proactively thwarted the menace to our community.”

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Wray referred to as the incident “probably the most despicable cyberattacks I’ve ever seen” and an instance of the growing dangers hospitals and different suppliers of crucial infrastructure face from hackers, together with state-sponsored ones.

“If malicious cyber actors are going to purposefully trigger destruction, or maintain knowledge and programs for ransom, they have a tendency to hit us someplace that is actually going to harm,” Wray mentioned.

© Thomson Reuters 2022