A healthcare provider experiences a ransomware attack, encrypting patient records and preventing access to critical medical data. The IT department must decide the best course of action to restore access while ensuring minimal impact on patient care. Which of the following steps should be prioritized to mitigate the attack's impact?

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BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

The scenario involves a ransomware attack on a healthcare provider, with critical data encrypted and patient care at risk. The question asks which steps should be prioritized to mitigate the attack's impact, so we evaluate each option in turn.
Option 1: 'Initiate the disaster recovery plan (DRP) to restore encrypted patient records from a recent backup.' This step focuses on recovering data and resuming operations from backups, which is a core component of restoring availability after data loss or corruption. It helps minimize downtime and data loss by leveraging proven recovery procedures.
Option 2: 'Use the recovery point objective (RPO) to determine how much recent data may be lost and restore the closest available version.' RPO is a governance metric that guides how much data loss is acceptable. In a ransomware incident, understanding RPO informs prioritization of backups and restoration sequencing, ensuring that the most critical recent data is recovered with minimal loss while preserving overall data integrity.
Option 3: 'Activate the business continuity plan (BCP) to ensure that healthcare operations can continue while IT systems are restored.' The BCP ensures that essential clinical and operational functions continue despite IT outages. This is crucial in healthcare where patient care must not be interrupted, so it supports continuity of services using alternate processes, temporary workflows, and resource allocation.
Option 4: 'All of the above' This choice suggests a comprehensive, multi-pronged response. In a ransomware scenario, coordinated actions spanning DRP, awareness of RPO for data recovery, and activation of BCP together address data availability, data integrity, and service continuity, reducing patient care disruption and safety risks.
A potential misconception in selecting a single approach would be to assume only one of these paths is needed. However, ransomware incidents typically require layered resilience: recover data (DRP), understand acceptable data loss (RPO) to guide recovery sequencing, and maintain operations through the BCP while systems are being restored. If any of these elements were neglected, patient care could suffer longer, data loss could be higher, or operations could stall. By integrating all three, the response covers data restoration, data loss tolerance, and continuity of clinical services, which collectively mitigate the overall impact more effectively.
In summary, the reasoning supports a synchronized response: use DRP to recover data, apply RPO to determine what data needs priority restoration, and leverage the BCP to keep essential healthcare operations running during IT remediation. This combination aligns with best practices for incident response in healthcare settings and minimizes patient care disruption while restoring systems.

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