The cyber security expert was very helpful. She said that they don't know who did this or when their systems will be restored but they had a team of people there to assist St. Vincent hospital and she was one of them.
This got me thinking.
I'm just 1 person and waiting an extra week to get back the results of my blood work is frustrating and inconvenient but not a huge deal.
But this is a MAJOR hospital. It's hard to imagine the impact, over the last month, the 10s of thousands of people and incidents, some involving extremely critical/vital needs with time of the essence.
And what if this is happening at OTHER hospitals and businesses in this country? It is!
And its extremely difficult to impossible to figure out the sources of these attacks.
And Russia, China and India have some of the most brilliant computer savvy people that could use the same cyber attack that took out my hospital's ability to function normally for a month..........on thousands of hospitals and businesses, energy delivery systems, power grids and so on.
This is nothing new. We've all READ about it and the threat dozens of times. Actually, there are 2 BRAND NEW items.
1. I got to witness the profound impact of a cyber attack and understand the seriousness. I'll have more on this.
2. We just attacked Russia. It was bad enough that we were having a war with Russia, using our weapons but the war was in Ukraine. Now we've escalated to attacking Russia on Russian soil. Whether you think that's justified or not is not the point.
The point is that Russia is not going to lay back and let it happen without a substantive response. Everybody is most concerned with nuclear weapons and rightly so because they can obliterate us in unimaginable ways.
But Putin is not likely to participate in a mutually agreed upon self destructive nuclear war, unless he is really backed up against the wall........and NATO is just the entity to do that.
However, Russia, China and India are extremely sophisticated with computer and internet technologies. They have thousands of skilled experts that are capable of causing cyber attacks on a large scale, just like the one I described. They can make it look like the attack is coming from a different continent and not be traceable.
Not might have but DO HAVE people that can do that right now.
Why would they want to do that?
US weapons attacking Russia IN RUSSIA ON RUSSIAN SOIL is one of the best reasons that I can think of.
The risk of this happening is pretty high.
So far, not only have there been 0 benefits, the negative consequences have been off the charts and the plans are, not to negotiate or to seek peace but instead, to support an escalating war.
Pretending to support one of the worlds most corrupt countries, that doesn't even use democratic elections anymore(to keep Zelensky in power) while just using it and their people to host a war with Russia. Costing us $200,000,000,000 so far.
I would venture an educated guess that part of the recent uptick in cyber attacks in our country is because of our war with Russia and even our role in Gaza, where 95% of the world is NOT on our side.
THIS IS INSANE!
These cyber attacks and ransom ware attacks are not speculative. They are happening right now and our country has been ENCOURAGING THEM because of our foreign policy.
We have more enemies/people that hate us, adversaries and people that strongly disagree with our foreign policies in the last few years, during a time of rapid advances in the ability of bad actors to use cyber attacks.
It's not even a matter of whether that will be used against us.
It's, how severe will it get and when.