The Center for Internet Security (CIS) has launched the Malicious Domain Blocking and Reporting (MDBR) service to help U.S. private hospitals to protect against ransomware and cyber-attacks. The service is free.
CIS used to offer the service for free only to public entities and governmental agencies. But now it’s available to private hospitals, multi-hospital and integrated systems, specialty hospitals, and more.
CIS is a not-for-profit entity, its mission is to develop and promote best practices and solutions for cyberdefense, build and lead communities, and create an environment of trust in cyberspace.
The organization says they decided to fully fund this service for private hospitals themselves “with no strings attached,” because “it’s the right thing to do, and no one else is doing it at scale.”
In 2020 there was a steep spike in ransomware attacks on hospitals worldwide that is due to the coronavirus pandemic. It was recently aptly described by Homeland Security Department Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as the ransomware “epidemic.”
According to the announcement, the MDBR service from CIS is a ransomware protection platform that provides free cyberdefense for U.S. hospitals.
Once an organization points its DNS requests to Akamai’s DNS server, every organization’s DNS lookup will be checked against a list of known and suspected malicious domains. Any malicious domains associated with malware, phishing, ransomware, and other cyber threats will be blocked.
For this to work, CIS teamed up with Akamai that offers its Enterprise Threat Protector software that can be used by any US public hospital to proactively identify, block, and mitigate ransomware threats. The service is available through the CIS’s Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC).
So far, CIS says over 1,000 government entities have used the product through MS-ISAC and
MDBR has prevented almost 750 million requests for access to infected domains.
