A healthcare cybersecurity executive has been charged with conducting a cyberattack on a Georgia nonprofit healthcare network in 2018 for personal gain, according to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
Vikas Singla was indicted by a federal grand jury June 8 and arraigned in front of a federal magistrate judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.
According to the DOJ announcement, he is allegedly responsible for a cyberattack on Gwinnett Medical Center (now Northside Hospital Gwinnett) that disrupted the two-hospital network’s phone service and network printer service in September 2018. He also allegedly accessed and obtained information from a digitizing device used by the healthcare network.
Singla is charged with 17 counts of intentional damage to a protected computer and one count of obtaining information from a protected computer.
Singla’s alleged cyberattack was “aided and abetted by others unknown to the Grand Jury,” according to the criminal indictment filed June 8. The case continues to be investigated by the FBI.
“This cyberattack on a hospital not only could have had disastrous consequences but patient’s personal information was also compromised,” Chris Hacker, acting special agent in charge of FBI Atlanta, said in a statement. “The FBI and our law enforcement partners are determined to hold accountable those who allegedly put people’s health and safety at risk while driven by greed.”
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Prosecutors alleged in the indictment (PDF) that Singla's actions could have damaged at least 10 computers, impaired the medical examination, diagnosis, treatment of care of at least one patient and caused a loss to Gwinnett Medical by affecting computers cumulatively worth at least $5,000.
The indictment did not reference Singla’s employer by name, referring to the company as “a network security company that offered services for the healthcare industry.” According to Singla’s LinkedIn page, he was chief operating officer of Atlanta-based, healthcare-focused network security firm Securolytics. The company also had previously named him as a co-founder and part of the executive team on its website.
Fierce Healthcare has reached out to Securolytics for comment and confirmation of Singla’s role at the company.
Gwinnett Medical Center and its sister facilities joined Northside Hospital, a three-hospital network, in August 2019. Today, the system consists of five hospitals and more than 250 outpatient facilities.
“We are pleased with this result and thank the many individuals and organizations which have worked so hard on our behalf,” a representative of the system told Fierce Healthcare in an email.
Cybersecurity incidents targeting healthcare organizations have become more prevalent and impactful over the years. A March report found that ransomware attacks cost the healthcare industry a collective $20.8 billion in downtime in 2020, while another reported a 123% increase in attempted attacks from 2019 to 2020.
The past month alone saw two high-profile attacks on Ireland’s national health service and San Diego-based Scripps Health. The latter required weeks to bring all of its systems back online and recently reported that its attackers had stolen health and personal finance information on nearly 150,000 of the health system’s patients.