It Solutions for Dentists Falls Victim to Ransomware AttackByBill Toulas-August 30 2019.777 According to informal sources, the organization has already paid the ransom and decrypted the files. Dental clinics say the decryptor is not working properly and can not open all the files. PerCsoft, a company based in Wisconsin that provides services and solutions for dental clinics, has been the victim of an attack on ransomware. PerCsoft is the cloud storage company for Digital Dental Record (Ddr), a service that helps dental clinics across the U.S. preserve information such as medical history consent forms emergency reports of patient screening tests and much more. The irony in the story is that in the case of a ransomware attack these records are stored on the Ddr cloud to keep the dental clinics secure. While PerCsoft has not released an official announcement on the incident, the Wisconsin Dental Association has made some information public. Brenna Sandler the association’s director of communications said the ransomware attack actually took place on Monday August 26 and compromised thousands of files corresponding to 400 dental practices. The program has not yet been restored but additional sources close to KrebsOnSecuritynew “ransomware as a service” in July and we will continue to see it being widely used by malicious actors. .778 According to the same unnamed sources, PerCsoft paid the ransom and secured the decryptor to help clients gain access to the locked-down files at the moment. As some dental offices say on Facebook, the decryptor given does not work with all the files, which in situations like this is something to be expected. Others believe that by the end of this month critical business processes such as payroll processing will be impossible to carry out. PerCsoft has told its customers through Facebook that they are trying to involve more firms to help them speed up the process of restoring the systems. While the amount of the ransom paid was not made known the pattern of victims paying them is noteworthy and has been documented in several recent studies as well. As always it is not advisable to pay ransoms as this allows the actors to strike again in the future and there is no assurance that you will ever get a decryption key. For eg, in this case the decryptor given is not able to unlock all files so PerCsoft paid for it is not exactly a reliable tool.