CISO Shares Lessons from LockBit Ransomware Attack on University
Zach Lewis, CISO at the University of Health Science and Pharmacy (UHSP) in St. Louis, shared insights from a LockBit ransomware attack that hit the institution in summer 2023. The university successfully recovered without paying the ransom, a process that involved significant challenges. The attack began with an outage, followed by the discovery of the ransomware note after files were encrypted. Lewis emphasized the importance of having a strong rapport with the executive team, which had previously participated in a ransomware tabletop exercise, enabling them to trust his leadership during the crisis. Post-incident, UHSP bolstered its security by migrating applications and infrastructure to cloud and SaaS platforms and centralizing identity and user access control through an enterprise browser.
