The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Microsoft have issued warnings about a high-severity flaw affecting Exchange hybrid deployments that could allow an attacker to escalate privileges in Exchange Online cloud environments undetected, potentially impacting the identity integrity of an organization’s Exchange Online service.

The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2025-53786 and affects hybrid-joined configurations of Exchange Server 2016, Exchange Server 2019, and Microsoft Exchange Server Subscription Edition. The vulnerability has a CVSS v3.1 severity score of 8.0 and is due to improper authentication. The vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker with administrative access to an on-premise Microsoft Exchange server.

In hybrid Exchange deployments, the on-premise Exchange Server and Exchange Online share the same service principal, which is used for authentication between the on-premise and cloud environments. If an attacker controls the on-premise Exchange server, they can potentially manipulate trusted tokens or API calls. Exchange Online will accept these as legitimate since the on-premise Exchange Server is implicitly trusted. Since actions originating from the on-premise Exchange Server do not always generate logs of malicious activity, audits of Exchange Online may not identify security breaches that originated in the on-premise Exchange Server.

At the time of the alert, no exploitation of the flaw has been observed in the wild; however, exploitation is considered “more likely”, so organizations with vulnerable hybrid Microsoft Exchange environments should ensure they follow Microsoft’s mitigation guidance:

Exchange hybrid users should review the Exchange Server Security Changes for Hybrid Deployments guidance to determine if their deployments are potentially affected and if there is a Cumulative Update available.

Microsoft April 2025 Exchange Server Hotfix Updates should be applied to the on-premise Exchange server, and Microsoft’s guidance on deploying a dedicated Exchange hybrid app should be followed.

Any organization using Exchange hybrid, or that has previously configured Exchange hybrid but no longer uses it, should review Microsoft’s Service Principal Clean-Up Mode, which includes guidance for resetting the service principal’s keyCredentials. When these steps have been completed, Microsoft Exchange Health Checker should be run to determine if any further actions are required.

Organizations with public-facing versions of Exchange Server or SharePoint Server that have reached end-of-life or end-of-service should be disconnected from the public Internet, and use should be discontinued.

Microsoft is encouraging customers to migrate to its Exchange Hybrid app as soon as possible to enhance the security of their hybrid environments, and said, “Starting in August 2025, we will begin temporarily blocking Exchange Web Services traffic using the Exchange Online shared service principal” to accelerate adoption of the dedicated Exchange hybrid app.

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A new report from the cybersecurity firm Semperis suggests ransomware attacks have decreased year-over-year, albeit only slightly. The ransomware risk report indicates healthcare is still a major target for ransomware gangs, with 77% of healthcare organizations targeted with ransomware in the past 12 months. 53% of those attacks were successful.

The report is based on a Censuswide survey of 1,500 IT and security professionals across multiple sectors. While attacks are down slightly, 60% of attacked healthcare organizations report suffering multiple attacks. In 30% of cases, they were attacked more than once in the same month, 35% were attacked in the same week, 14% were attacked multiple times on the same day, and 12% faced simultaneous attacks.

A general trend in recent years, as reported by several firms, is fewer victims of ransomware attacks paying ransoms, although across all industry sectors in the U.S., 81% attacked companies paid the ransom, an increase from last year. Ransom payment was far less common in healthcare. According to Semperis, 53% of healthcare victims paid a ransom to either prevent the publication of stolen data, obtain decryption keys, or both. The ransom paid was less than $500,000 for 55% of companies, 39% paid between $500,000 and $1 million, and 5% paid more than $1 million.

The lower rate of ransom payment in healthcare may be due to genuine concerns that the attackers will not be true to their word. The ransomware attack on Change Healthcare last year made that clear. A $22 million ransom was paid to the BlackCat ransomware group to delete the stolen data; however, after pulling an exit scam, the affiliate behind the attack retained a copy of the data and attempted extortion a second time through a different group, RansomHub. Further, law enforcement operations against LockBit found the group lied about data deletion. Copies of stolen data were found on servers after the ransom was paid. Payment of a ransom is also no guarantee that data can be recovered. On average, 15% of companies that paid the ransom did not receive usable decryption keys, and a further 3% found that their data had been published or misused even when payment was made.

Ransomware groups have been observed adopting more aggressive tactics to increase pressure on victims. Falling profits have prompted some groups to start contacting patients of an attacked healthcare provider directly to increase pressure and get the ransom paid, or in some cases, patients have been extorted. Ransomware groups have threatened to file complaints with regulators, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). According to Semperis, 47% of attacks involved threats of regulatory complaints, and 41% of attacks on healthcare organizations. In 62% of healthcare attacks, the threat actor threatened to release private or proprietary data. There is also a growing trend of physical threats against staff members, which occurred in 40% of attacks across all sectors, and 31% of attacks on healthcare organizations.

“With the introduction of generative AI and the fast development of agentic AI attacks, creating more advanced tools with more destructive impact is easier, so threat actors no longer need a lot of money and resources to create those tools,” said Yossi Rachman, Semperis Director of Security Research. “As a result, even a drop in ransom payments will not necessarily stop attack groups from proliferating and conducting more effective and frequent attacks.”

Semperis found that organizations are getting better at detecting and blocking attacks, but when attacks occur, they can cause considerable harm. For 53% of healthcare victims, recovery took from a day to a week, with 31% of attacked healthcare organizations taking between one week and one month to fully return to normal operations. The main business disruptions were data loss/compromise, reputational damage, and job losses. In one attack this year, a healthcare provider permanently closed the business after a ransomware attack.

The biggest challenges faced in healthcare were the frequency and sophistication of threats, attacks on identity systems, and regulatory compliance. 78% of victims said attacks compromised their identity infrastructure, yet only 61% maintained a dedicated AD-specific backup system. Semperis strongly advises companies to implement technology to protect IAM infrastructure, since this is the #1 target. It is also important to document, train, and test to improve the response to a ransomware attack, as an attack is almost inevitable.

“Train for the day you are attacked,” advises Rachman. “See that everybody knows exactly what they should do, which systems, processes, and tools need to be involved, and do that every six months.” Further, when cybersecurity has been improved, it is necessary to evaluate the security of partners and supply chain vendors, as even with excellent security, supply chain vulnerabilities could easily be exploited.

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IBM has published the 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report, which shows a fall in the global average cost of a data breach, but an increase in the cost of U.S. data breaches, which have set a new record at $10.22 million, increasing by 9.2% from an average of $9.36 million in 2024. The higher data breach costs in the United States were largely due to higher regulatory fines and detection and escalation costs. Globally, data breach costs have fallen for the first time in five years to an average of $4.44 million.

Global average cost of a data breach in 2025 (in millions). Source: IBM

IBM has been releasing data breach cost reports for the past 20 years. This year, the study was conducted on 600 organizations of various sizes from 16 countries and geographic regions. Out of the 600 organizations participating in the study, 16% were located in the United States and Canada. The report is based on an analysis of data from organizations in 17 industries, 2% of which are in the healthcare industry.

There has been a fall in the cost of healthcare data breaches in the United States, which dropped by $2.35 million year-over-year to an average of $7.42 million. While the cost of a healthcare data breach has fallen significantly, healthcare data breaches are still the costliest out of all industries studied by IBM, and have been for the past 14 years.

Globally, the time to identify and contain a data breach fell to a 9-year low of 241 days, reducing by 17 days compared to 2024. IBM explains that the reduction in average containment time was largely due to a higher number of organizations detecting the data breach internally rather than being notified by an attacker. Healthcare data breaches took the longest to identify and contain, at an average of 279 days, five weeks longer than the global average breach lifecycle.

Phishing was the leading initial access vector in 2025, accounting for almost 16% of data breaches, replacing stolen credentials (10%), last year’s leading initial access vector, which fell to third spot behind supply chain compromise (15%). Ransomware continues to be a problem for healthcare organizations; however, more organizations are choosing not to pay ransoms. Last year, 59% of organizations that experienced a ransomware attack refused to pay the ransom, increasing to 63% this year.  With fewer organizations making payments, ransom demands have remained high, with an average of $5.08 million demanded for attacker-disclosed attacks. Fewer victims of ransomware attacks involve law enforcement, even though law enforcement involvement shaved an average of $1 million off data breach costs last year. In 2024, 52% of ransomware victims contacted and involved law enforcement, compared to 40% in 2025.

Data breaches invariably result in operational disruption, with almost all breached organizations reporting at least some disruption to operations as a result of a breach. The majority of breached organizations took more than 100 days to recover from a data breach. While breached organizations often absorb the cost of a data breach, this year, almost half of the organizations that suffered a data breach said they would be raising the price of goods and services as a result, with almost one-third planning to increase costs by 15% or more due to a data breach.

Each year, the cost of a data breach report identifies the main factors that increase or decrease breach costs. The biggest components in breach costs were detection and escalation ($1.47 million), lost business ($1.38 million), and post-breach response ($1.2 million), although IBM notes that detection and escalation costs fell by almost 10% compared to last year, and lost business and post-breach response costs also fell.

Based on a global average cost of $4.88 million, the most important factors for reducing data breach costs were adoptiong a DevSecOps approach (-$227K), AI-driven and ML-driven insights (-$223K), security analytics or SIEM (-$212K), threat intelligence (-$211K), and data encryption (-$208K). The main factors that increased breach costs were supply chain breaches (+$227K), security systems complexity (+$207K), shadow IT (+$200K), and AI tool adoption (+$193.5K).

Shadow IT – unauthorized use of software and devices – was a new addition to this year’s top three factors increasing data breach costs. Shadow IT increases the attack surface and creates a security blind spot, and IBM warns that many organizations are failing to look for shadow IT, so it remains undetected and can provide an easily exploitable backdoor into networks. On average, organizations with a high level of shadow IT experienced data breach costs $670K higher than organizations with a low level of shadow IT.

For this year’s report, IBM looked at the adoption of AI and found that AI adoption is outpacing governance. The majority of organizations that have adopted AI solutions said they did not have AI governance policies to mitigate or manage the risk of AI. Organizations lacking AI governance paid higher costs when breached. IBM has determined that AI models and applications are an emerging attack surface, especially in the case of shadow AI. This year, 13% of organizations reported a security incident involving an AI model or application that resulted in a data breach, and an overwhelming majority of those breached organizations – 97% – said they lacked proper AI access controls.

There has been growing concern about the use of generative AI by threat actors, such as for accelerating malware development and creating text and images for phishing and social engineering campaigns. IBM looked at the prevalence of AI-driven attacks and found that 16% of breaches involved the use of AI by attackers, with the majority of those attacks involving phishing (37%) or deepfakes (35%).

Last year, almost two-thirds of organizations said they would be increasing investment in cybersecurity over the next 12 months, but only 49% of organizations are planning to increase investment in the next 12 months. Fewer than half of the organizations planning to increase security investment said they were focusing on AI-driven solutions or services.

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Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has released further information about last month’s seizure of dark web domains used by the BlackSuit ransomware group.

On July 24, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) confirmed that an international law enforcement operation codenamed Operation Checkmate resulted in the seizure of domains used by the BlackSuit ransomware group. Banners were added to those sites confirming they were under the control of law enforcement. The sites were used by the BlackSuit ransomware group to leak data stolen and to communicate with victims to negotiate ransom payments.

The HSI confirmed in an August 7, 2025, announcement that BlackSuit was the successor to Royal ransomware. Both groups have terrorized critical infrastructure entities around the world since Royal emerged in 2022. Royal was the successor to Quantum ransomware, which is thought to be one of the groups operated by former members of the disbanded Conti ransomware operation.

Since 2022, Royal and BlackSuit have conducted more than 450 successful ransomware attacks on companies in the United States, including many critical infrastructure entities in healthcare, education, public safety, energy, and the government.  The ransomware groups engaged in double extortion, stealing data and encrypting files, demanding payment to prevent the data from being leaked and to obtain the decryption keys. Victims have paid the Royal and BlackSuit more than $370 million in ransom payments, based on current cryptocurrency values.

The operation involved the HSI Cyber Crimes Center, IRS Criminal Investigation’s Cyber Crimes Unit, the U.S. Secret Service, the FBI, Europol, and multiple international law enforcement partners, and resulted in the seizure of the group’s servers, domains, and digital assets used to support the group’s attacks, data theft, extortion, and money laundering.

“Disrupting ransomware infrastructure is not only about taking down servers — it’s about dismantling the entire ecosystem that enables cybercriminals to operate with impunity,” said HSI Cyber Crimes Center Deputy Assistant Director Michael Prado. “This operation is the result of tireless international coordination and shows our collective resolve to hold ransomware actors accountable.”

A DoJ announcement on August 11, 2025, explained that laundered cryptocurrency valued at $1,091,453 had been seized as part of the operation, along with four servers and nine domains. The DoJ explained that one of the victims of the Royal ransomware group paid a 49.3120227 Bitcoin ransom to decrypt their data, which was valued at $1,445,454.86 at the time of the transaction. Some of the proceeds, $1,091,453, were repeatedly deposited and withdrawn in a virtual currency exchange to hide the source of the funds. The funds were frozen by the exchange on or around January 9, 2024, and were obtained by U.S. authorities after issuing a warrant for seizure.

“The BlackSuit ransomware gang’s persistent targeting of U.S. critical infrastructure represents a serious threat to U.S. public safety,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg. “The National Security Division is proud to be part of an ongoing team of government agencies and partners working to protect our Nation from threats to our critical infrastructure.”

July 25, 2025: BlackSuit Ransomware Dark Web Sites Seized by Law Enforcement

The dark web sites of the BlackSuit ransomware group have been seized as part of an international law enforcement operation. The takedown includes BlackSuit’s negotiation and data leak sites, following a court order that authorized the seizure.

The dark web sites have been replaced with banners advising visitors about the seizure by U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, part of Operation CheckMate. Several law enforcement partners assisted with the operation, including the U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), Europol, the UK National Crime Agency, and law enforcement agencies in Canada, Germany, Ukraine, Lithuania, Ireland, and France. The Romanian cybersecurity firm BitDefender also assisted during the operation. The authorities have yet to make an announcement about the operation and any other achievements.

BlackSuit ransomware first appeared in June 2023, having rebranded following an attack on the City of Dallas in Texas. The group previously operated under the name Royal from September 2022 to June 2023. Prior to that, Royal operated under the name Quantum and is believed to have been started by members of the Conti ransomware group. Operating as BlackSuit, the group is thought to have claimed more than 180 victims worldwide and more than 350 victims under the name Royal.

While the takedown is good news, researchers have suggested that BlackSuit may have already rebranded or that some former members of BlackSuit have formed a new group, Chaos ransomware. Researchers at Cisco Talos explained in a June 24, 2025, blog post that they have assessed with moderate confidence that the new group was formed by members of the BlackSuit ransomware group due to similarities in the encryption methodology, ransom note, and toolset used in attacks. Chaos has already conducted at least ten attacks, mostly in the United States. The new group does not appear to be targeting any specific industries.

“The disruption of BlackSuit’s infrastructure marks another important milestone in the fight against organized cybercrime,” stated a representative of the Draco Team, Bitdefender’s cybercrime unit, who participated in the takedown. “We commend our law enforcement partners for their coordination and determination. Operations like this reinforce the critical role of public-private partnerships in tracking, exposing, and ultimately dismantling ransomware groups that operate in the shadows. When global expertise is aligned, cybercriminals have fewer places to hide.”

On July 28, 2025, FBI Dallas announced the seizure of 20 Bitcoins (now valued at $2.3 million) from a cryptocurrency address belonging to a member of the Chaos ransomware group. The funds were tracked to a Bitcoin wallet used by an affiliate with the moniker “Hors” who is suspected of conducting attacks and extorting payments from companies in the Northern District of Texas and elsewhere. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil complaint in the Northern District of Texas on July 24, 2025, seeking the forfeiture of the funds, which were seized by the FBI in Dallas in mid-April.

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The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) have issued a joint alert about the Interlock ransomware group, which has accelerated attacks on businesses and critical infrastructure organizations. The alert shares the latest tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and indicators of compromise (IoCs) collected from investigations of the group’s ransomware attacks in June 2025.

Interlock is a ransomware-as-a-service operation that first emerged in September 2024. The group has attacked entities in multiple sectors but appears to favor organizations in the healthcare and public health (HPH) sector. Healthcare victims include the kidney dialysis giant DaVita, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, Kettering Health, Drug and Alcohol Treatment Services, Brockton Neighborhood Health Center, and Naper Grove Vision Care.

Interlock is a financially motivated cybercriminal group that uses ransomware in its attacks on Windows and Linux systems, favoring attacks in North America and Europe. The group engages in double extortion tactics, breaching networks, stealing data, and demanding payment to decrypt files and prevent the publication of the stolen data on its dark web data leak site. The group’s TTPs are constantly evolving, and several new techniques have been observed in recent weeks.

One relatively unusual technique for a ransomware group is the use of compromised legitimate websites for drive-by downloads, disguising the payload as an installer for Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and other popular software solutions. These attacks distribute a remote access trojan, which provides initial access. The RAT executes a PowerShell script, which establishes persistence by dropping a file into the Windows Startup Folder to ensure it runs each time the user logs in. Alternatively, a PowerShell command is used to make a run key value in the Windows Registry for persistence.

The group has also been observed using the ClickFix social engineering technique for initial access. This involves tricking individuals into executing a malicious payload by convincing them that doing so will fix a problem on their device – blocking spam emails, removing a fictitious malware infection, etc.

Once initial access has been gained, tools such as Interlock RAT and NodeSnake RAT are used for C2 communications and command execution. The group has been observed using PowerShell to download a credential stealer and keylogger to harvest credentials for lateral movement and privilege escalation. Azure Storage Explorer is used to access Azure storage accounts, AzCopy is used to upload data to the Azure storage blob, and file transfer tools such as WinSCP have also been used for data exfiltration.

The authoring agencies have made several recommendations to mitigate Interlock threat activity, which include the following:

• Implement a domain name filtering (DNS) solution to block access to malicious websites
• Implement a web access firewall
• Patch promptly and keep all software and operating systems up to date
• Train end users to spot social engineering and phishing attempts
• Segment networks to restrict lateral movement
• Implement robust identity, credential, and access policies
• Implement multifactor authentication on all accounts and services as far as possible, ideally phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication.
• Ensure backups are made of the entire organization’s data infrastructure, and that backup data is encrypted, immutable, and stored securely off-site

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Last week, a pair of bipartisan bills were introduced in the House of Representatives and Senate that seek to enhance the cybersecurity of the healthcare and public health (HPH) sector by improving coordination at the federal level to ensure that government agencies can respond quickly and efficiently to cyberattacks on HPH sector entities.

Healthcare cyberattacks have increased significantly in recent years, with more than 700 data breaches affecting 500 or more individuals reported to the HHS’ Office for Civil Rights in each of the past four years. In the past couple of years, a huge volume of healthcare records has been breached. In 2023, the protected health information of more than 172 million individuals was exposed or impermissibly disclosed in healthcare data breaches, and 278 million individuals were affected by healthcare data breaches in 2024.

In 2024, a ransomware group breached the systems of Change Healthcare, stole the records of an estimated 190 million individuals, and used ransomware to encrypt files. The attack caused massive disruption to the revenue cycles of healthcare providers across the country due to the prolonged outage of Change Healthcare’s systems, considerable disruption to patient care across the country, and the stolen data was leaked on the dark web.

The Healthcare Cybersecurity Act of 2025 was introduced by Congressman Jason Crow (D-CO), who was joined in introducing the legislation by Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA). A companion bill was introduced in the Senate by Senators Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and Todd Young (R-IN). Congressman Crow previously introduced the Healthcare Cybersecurity Act in the 117^th and 118^th Congresses. “As technology advances, we must do more to protect Americans’ sensitive data,” said Congressman Crow. “That’s why I’m leading bipartisan legislation to strengthen our defenses and protect families from cyberattackers.”

If passed, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would be required to collaborate on improving HPH sector cybersecurity. A liaison would be created between the two agencies to coordinate the responses to cyberattacks, and the act would authorize cybersecurity training for all relevant personnel. The bill also requires CISA and the HHS to conduct a study to identify the specific risks faced by the HPH sector.

“Cyberattacks on our healthcare system endanger more than data—they put lives at risk. I’ve long worked to strengthen our nation’s cyber defenses where Americans are most exposed, from small businesses to hospitals. This bipartisan bill takes direct, strategic action: empowering CISA and HHS to coordinate real-time threat sharing, expanding cybersecurity training for providers, and establishing a dedicated liaison to bolster response. We’re not just responding to attacks—we’re building the infrastructure to prevent them, protect patient privacy, and defend a vital pillar of our national security,” said Congressman Fitzpatrick.

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A high-severity vulnerability has been identified in the MicroDicom DICOM Viewer, a popular free-to-use software for viewing and manipulating DICOM medical images.

The vulnerability can be exploited remotely in a low complexity attack, and successful exploitation can allow the execution of arbitrary code on vulnerable installations of DICOM Viewer; however, user interaction is required to exploit the vulnerability. A threat actor would need to convince a user to open a malicious DICOM file locally or visit a specially crafted malicious web page, for example, through social engineering or phishing.

The vulnerability affects DICOM Viewer version 2025.2 (Build 8154) and prior versions and is tracked as CVE-2025-5943.  The vulnerability is an out-of-bounds write issue, where it is possible to write to memory outside the bounds of the intended buffer and execute arbitrary code. The vulnerability has been assigned a CVSS v4 base score of 8.6 out of 10 and a CVSS v3.1 base score of 8.8 out of 10. While there have been no known cases of the vulnerability being exploited in the wild at the time of disclosure, prompt patching is recommended. The vulnerability has been fixed in version 2025.3 and later versions.

The vulnerability was identified by independent security researcher Michael Heinzl, who reported the vulnerability to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA). The latest announcement follows a May 2025 disclosure of two high-severity vulnerabilities, a February 2025 disclosure of a medium-severity vulnerability that can be exploited in a machine-in-the-middle (MitM) attack, and four high-severity vulnerabilities identified in 2024 and disclosed in March and June last year.

Since vulnerabilities are frequently discovered, it is advisable to locate DICOM Viewer behind a firewall, to isolate it from business networks, and if remote access is required, to use a secure method of connection such as a Virtual Private Network (VPN) and ensure that the VPN is kept up to date.

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A recent data analysis by Comparitech has revealed that the average time for a U.S. healthcare organization to report a ransomware attack is 3.7 months, the shortest time out of all industries represented in the study. Across all industries, the average time to report a ransomware attack in 2023 was 5.1 months, a considerable increase from the average of 2.1 months in 2018.

In 2024, ransomware-related data breaches took an average of 3.7 months to report, although it is too early to obtain reliable reporting data, as ransomware victims are still reporting ransomware-related data breaches from last year.

Comparitech’s researchers analyzed data from 2,600 U.S. ransomware attacks since 2018. Over the entire period of study, the average time to report a data breach following a ransomware attack was 4.1 months. The legal sector delayed reporting data breaches for the longest time, taking an average of 6.4 months to report the data breach.

While healthcare had the shortest breach reporting times, one healthcare entity had an exceptionally long delay between the date of the attack and the issuing of notifications. Ventura Orthopedics experienced a ransomware attack in July 2020, yet it took 38 months for notification letters to be issued, which were not sent until September 2023.  Another healthcare entity had an exceptionally long delay before notifications were issued. It took two years from the date of the attack for Westend Dental to issue notification letters, earning the company a $350,000 financial penalty.

The reporting time is no doubt influenced by federal and state laws. In healthcare, the Breach Notification Rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires regulated entities to report a data breach within 60 days of the date of discovery, and if the total number of affected individuals is not yet known, the regulated entity must report the breach using an estimated total for the number of affected individuals, with the estimated figure typically being 500 or 501. A figure of 500 affected individuals is the threshold for media announcements and public listing of the data breach on the HHS’ Office for Civil Rights breach portal.

Looking at the business sector only, healthcare also had one of the shortest delays, taking an average of 3.4 months to report the data breach, slightly ahead of utilities at 3.3 months. Healthcare businesses in this sector were not direct healthcare providers.

Comparitech also identified shorter breach reporting times in states that have implemented data breach notification laws, with an average time of 3.9 months to report a breach in those states compared to 4.2 months in other states. The states with the longest breach reporting times were Wyoming (7.3 months), the District of Columbia (6.6 months), and North Dakota (6.3 months), whereas the states with the shortest reporting periods were Montana (1.9 months), South Dakota (2.2 months), and Alaska (2.3 months).

While it may not be possible to issue notification letters quickly, it is important to announce ransomware attacks to allow potentially affected individuals to take steps to protect themselves. If it takes 4.1 months on average to report a ransomware-related data breach, that gives ample time for stolen data to be misused.

Ransomware groups that engage in double extortion list the stolen data on their data leak sites if the ransom is not paid, and the data can be downloaded by anyone. That means the data could be misused for several months before the affected individuals are notified. If a notice is added to the breached organization’s website, even if data theft has not been confirmed, consumers would be aware that they could potentially be at risk and could take steps to protect themselves.

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