Technology

why isn’t more being done to improve security and find the criminals?

It is but Law Enforcement and Healthcare I.T. can't keep up with the growing number of threats and threat actors. From the perspective of someone in Healthcare I.T. I've watched lots of money, time, and effort get spent on securing systems but it's never quite enough and it never happens fast enough.

MFA all the things, HIPS on everything, EDR on everything, Zero Trust everything, regular patching of all systems, High End Firewalls, encrypt all the things, bi-annual security reviews, DNS Filtering, regular network sweeps for unknown or unmanaged equipment...and you can still end up getting whacked by a 0 Day exploit in a commercial helpdesk tool. (This is what got Change / Optum).

The criminals typically belong to overseas hacking groups, many of which are in places that Western Law Enforcement can't reach like Russia, Belarus, China, and North Korea.

It's a nearly impossible challenge and it's never going to end as long as these systems have any path to the public internet.

The FBI et al. do try to find the guys. Arrests happen relatively frequently.

But security improvements don't happen because they cost money, and nobody is making them do it, though this is slowly changing.

I work in I.T. for a healthcare company. Ascension is a pretty large one. The bigger a company gets and the faster it grows, the more it takes on a diversity of varying technologies that all need to be managed, migrated, killed off, merged, hardened, etc. It’s a difficult job especially for healthcare. I know that the company I work for is working very hard to keep up with things, but it’s a logistical nightmare. You MUST have very smart people in charge that have the right priorities. You have to have information channels open to make sure administration knows what the potential issues are. Compartmentalization of information and access. There are so many potential points of failure it’s insane. And then there’s the most important thing of all: making sure all employees are educated enough that they don’t let their credentials get compromised.

Things are getting worse in general because of how hard it is to stay on top of everything nowadays. I just recently got a couple of letters in the mail about my info being leaked by some companies that had my info. I just have to do my part to stay on top of my own responsibilities, watch my own identity and finances, and make sure those around me are being secure, as well. Everybody needs to know how important this is, and many do, but I don’t think enough people really understand or make it a priority.

HHS is instituting new rules for healthcare (and other industries) to help track and respond to these things. The government is getting very involved with this now. I hope it helps.

I'm in IT in a healthcare-adjacent sector. Never underestimate the motivation or tenacity of foreign state actors, organized crime and chaotic neutral hacking collectives. You have limited time and budget, and both financial and risk based approval processes to deal with. They have time, ideology¹, and financial incentives.

You can't win in the face of that.

¹ sometimes it's hacking for hackings sake, but more typically it's to disrupt critical services and extort modest capital to go away. Rinse, repeat, make that bank on volume.

Fixing the issue doesn't line the pockets of investors. People aren't going to stop going to the hospital, so why fix it?