Doing this sort of thing to hospitals...sick people relying on the computers and machines (connected to computers etc) 2016 -Empathy where art though

Well, all I can say is I hope that they find the hackers and sever their heads from their bodies live on national television. 

Not surprising development.  Not in the least.  Sutton's law.

Sickening, but not surprising.

Indeed, Andy...empathy and compassion. Not to be had from that scum.

Indeed, Daiwa.

They need to be managed like spammers on Stardock's sites....

Summary execution without trial....

Why wasn't the hospital running real time backups?  They might have lost a bit of info but could have restored most of the data.  I would imaging the FBI and possibly the CIA are involved on our end and possibly Interpol as well so let's hop they track down the culprits.  It's pretty sad that anyone would stoop so low as to steal someone's health information.  You might want to join Krebs on Security as he is an expert at rooting out criminals. 

ID the source. Once found......cause its extinction. Who, what, when or where does not matter.

Easier said than done, unfortunately.

Not what they were after, as they have no use for it except as a hostage.  Just a means to an end.

Its not really the health info that they have, its your name, address, phone #, ssan and the names and addresses of whoever you put down as next of kin to call.

And the world banks want to do away with paper money and go with debit/credit cards.  How safe would that be!

Eventually the monetary system will be replaced with biometrics ....retinal scans...finger prints...even face recognition.

Cards etc will be a thing of the past ...

For those who haven't seen the news already, they ended up settling for 'only' $17,000 worth of BTC.

http://boingboing.net/2016/02/18/hollywood-hospital-ransoms-its.html

What needs to happen is that all systems running complexes that are needed by the majority of people, like Energy/Water/Medical/Food etc have to sever its tighs with the internet. And become closed standalone systems which don't allow outside connections - not even USB sticks etc - and that perhaps don't even allow any changes to the internal code at all. A computer is basically just a machine that fulfills a specific function, now in running an nuclear power plant that function can be defined exactly, and, if no hardware changes are done, could stay the same. 

Why do all these crucial & important systems need to have that much flexibility? Because currently it's handy, it's easy, it's cheap - it's just to save money, getting things more cheap. Let's just interconnect all our industry via the internet with everybody, so you can easily update these systems (saves some bucks when you don't have to order a postal CD) or supply the government with statistics...

But everybody knows that no security system, firewall etc is a 100% guarantee of protection so for all this ease they willfully - and knowingly - invite these kinds of dangers. And we all know that the industry is very lax to invest into good personal for online security, that's their second fault.

The culprits above are merely criminals wanting to make money, what do you think will happen if you replace these people with terrorists; or another nation you're at war with. They may take down your entire source of electricity, water, everything... and there are already military projections that state that, esp. for highly industrialised states, people will start dying in massive amounts after 1 week of such an attack.