April 24, 2014 - the Boston Children’s Hospital - Cyber Incident Paper

Boston Children’s Hospital – Possible “Anonymous” Attack
Cyber Incident

On April 24, 2014, the Boston Children’s Hospital reported they had been under a cyberattack from an unknown source for the previous four days.  This paper will focus on the details of the cyber security incident, the impact of the attack, the consequences, and a brief explanation of the mitigation steps the hospital has taken post incident. 

The Boston Children’s Hospital was a victim of a cyberattack between the dates of April 20 and April 25, 2014.  The cyberattack on the hospital focused on bringing down the hospital’s internal website – used by hospital personnel to check appointments, test results, and other patient information (Wen, 2014).  The hackers used a distributed denial of service approach attack, which consisted of a bombardment of traffic to the hospitals web page, causing it to crash and become unusable to all hospital staff.  The hospital has insisted that no patient data or information has been compromised due to these cyberattacks (Farrell, 2014).  Law enforcement was notified of the attacks, but it is unconfirmed whether investigations were started. 

It is suspected the attackers were a part of the well-known hacker network “Anonymous”.  Even though no evidence exists to prove this group is behind the attack on the Children’s Hospital, the incident has all the markings of a typical Anonymous cyberattack.  The group typically targets Internet pages of large organizations and cripples them by with a barrage of traffic (Wen, 2014).  This denial of service attack is exactly what had been happening to the hospital’s web server for days. 

The incident is believed to have been in response to the recent Justina Pelletier custody case, which ruled in the removal of Justina from her parents’ custody to the State of Massachusetts.  In 2013, Justina was brought to the Boston Children’s Hospital for treatment of severe intestinal problems, among other issues (Wen, 2014).  Pelletier’s doctors concluded that her problems stemmed from psychiatric issues, not medical.  After this diagnosis, the hospital was forced to file medical child abuse charges against Pelletier’s parents, believing they were pushing too hard for unnecessary medical interventions (Wen, 2014).  The judge in the case ruled in favor the hospital and concluded Pelletier’s parents were “unfit to care for their child’s complex medical and psychiatric needs”, giving permanent custody of the child to the state (Wen, 2014).