National Veterinary Associates (NVA), a California company that owns more than 700 animal care facilities around the globe, is still working to recover from a ransomware attack late last month that affected more than half of those properties, separating many veterinary practices from their patient records, payment systems and practice management software. NVA says it expects to have all facilities fully back up and running normally within the next week.
Agoura Hills, Calif.-based NVA bills itself as is the largest private owner of freestanding veterinary hospitals in the United States. The company’s Web site says it currently owns roughly 700 veterinary hospitals and animal boarding facilities in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
NVA said it discovered the ransomware outbreak on the morning of Sunday, Oct. 27, and soon after hired two outside security firms to investigate and remediate the attack. A source close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity that NVA was hit with Ryuk, a ransomware strain first spotted in August 2018 that targets mostly large organizations for a high-ransom return.
NVA declined to answer questions about the malware, or whether the NVA paid the ransom demand.
“It was ransomware, but we’ve been referring to it as a malware incident,” said Laura Koester, NVA’s chief marketing officer.
Koester said because every NVA hospital runs their IT operations as they see fit, not all were affected. More importantly, she said, all of the NVA’s hospitals have remained open and able to see clients (animals in need of care), and access to patient records has been fully restored to all affected hospitals.
“For a few days, some [pet owners] couldn’t do online bookings, and some hospitals had to look at different records for their patients,” Koester said. “But throughout this whole thing, if there was a sick animal, we saw them. No one closed their doors.”
The source close to the investigation painted a slight less rosy picture of the situation at NVA, and said the company’s response has been complicated by the effects of wildfires surrounding its headquarters in Los Angeles County: A year ago, a destructive wildfire in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties burned almost 100,00 acres, destroyed more than 1,600 structures, killed three people and prompted the evacuation of nearly 300,000 people — including all residents of Agoura Hills.
“The support center was scheduled to be closed on Friday Oct 25, 2019 due to poor air quality caused by wildfires to the north,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous. “Around 2 am PT [Oct. 27], the Ryuk virus was unleashed at NVA. Approximately 400 locations were infected. [Microsoft] Active Directory and Exchange servers were infected. Many of the infected locations immediately lost access to their Patient Information Management systems (PIMs). These locations were immediately unable to provide care.”
The source shared internal communications from different NVA executives to their hospitals about the extent of the remediation efforts and possible source of the compromise, which seemed to suggest that at least some NVA properties have been struggling to accommodate patients. Continue reading