The Risks and Consequences of Lax Patch Management | Cybersecurity
Although software patches can be inconvenient and cumbersome for both enterprises and individual users, these fixes serve an important role in protecting computer systems which are now vital to everyday life.
Earlier this month, a woman with a life-threatening condition passed away after hackers crashed the IT systems of a major hospital in the city of Dusseldorf.
The emergency patient could not be admitted for treatment because the Duesseldorf University Clinic could not access data after its systems had been disrupted for a week by an apparent ransomware attack. As a result, the woman was sent to a hospital 20 miles away where doctors were not able to begin treatment for another hour. She subsequently died.
To sabotage the hospital systems, the hackers exploited a Citrix ADC CVE-2019-19781 vulnerability which can let attackers execute their own code on hacked servers. The “misdirected” attack reportedly was originally intended for Heinrich Heine
