Agencies update technical signatures of destructive malware, recommend additional defensive actions

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and FBI yesterday updated their February advisory on destructive malware targeting organizations in Ukraine to include additional indicators of compromise (IOCs), and encouraged U.S. organizations to take certain actions to monitor and protect their networks.

John Riggi, AHA’s national advisor for cybersecurity and risk, said, “This advisory provides additional IOCs for the WhisperGate malware, first discovered on Ukrainian networks in January 2022. Although the malware poses as ransomware, it actually destroys the data making it unrecoverable. Our ongoing concern is that U.S. hospitals and health systems, or one of our mission-critical service providers, become collateral damage in a destructive malware attack targeted against Ukraine. It is strongly recommended that all heightened defensive measures remain in place and cross-function cyber incident response plans, downtime procedures and backups be tested.”  

For more information on this or other cyber and risk issues, contact Riggi at jriggi@aha.org.