The FBI blocked a planned cyberattack on a children’s hospital

Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, says his teams were able to block a planned cyberattack against a children’s hospital in the United States, with Iranian hackers as perpetrators. This is a children’s hospital in the Boston area.

A hospital avoided a major cyberattack

As part of a conference on cybersecurity organized by Boston University, the director of the FBI has indicated that his agents provided children’s hospital officials with the information they needed last summer to block what would have been “one of the most despicable cyberattacks I have ever seen”.

The FBI boss told the story as part of a larger discourse on the cyber threat from Russia, China and Iran, and the need for a partnership between the US government and industry private. He said US federal police and Boston Children’s Hospital have been working closely since an activist targeted the facility’s computer network in 2014. The attack cost the facility tens of thousands of dollars. and disrupted care for several days.

Christopher Wray did not say why Iran was targeting the hospital, but he did point out that this country and others hire cybermercenaries to launch attacks on their behalf. But because the U.S. government considers health care one of the nation’s 16 critical infrastructures, he said, care providers like hospitals are tempting targets for hackers.