Healthcare Ransomware Victims Deserve Sympathy, Not A Free Pass (2026)

Posted on Jan 13

• Originally published at harwoodlabs.xyz

The University of Hawaii Cancer Center's ransomware attack in August reveals an uncomfortable truth: our collective sympathy for healthcare ransomware victims has become a shield protecting organizations from accountability for inexcusable security failures.

When I read that UH paid the ransom and that files containing Social Security numbers from the 1990s were compromised, my first reaction wasn't sympathy. It was frustration. Here's an organization entrusted with cancer research data, storing decades-old files with SSNs in systems so poorly secured that ransomware operators waltzed in and encrypted them. Yet the dominant narrative remains: another healthcare victim struck by cybercriminals.

This framing is not just wrong, it's dangerous. By treating every healthcare ransomware incident as an unavoidable tragedy rather than a preventable failure, we're subsidizing poor security practices and feeding the very ransomware ecosystem we claim to want to stop.

Healthcare organizations have perfected the art of deflection after ransomware attacks. The playbook is predictable: emphasize the mission (saving lives, advancing research), minimize responsibility (sophisticated threat actors, resource constraints), and pivot quickly to recovery efforts. The University of Hawaii hit every note perfectly.

But let's examine what actually happened here. UH stored research files containing SSNs from the 1990s on systems that could be compromised by ransomware operators. This isn't a case of cutting-edge attackers exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in mission-critical equipment. This is basic data hygiene failure.

Think about it: these SSNs were collected in the 1990s, when Bill Clinton was president and Windows 95 was revolutionary. UH continued storing this data for three decades without apparently asking fundamental questions like "Do we still need this?" or "Should decades-old participant data be sitting on networked systems?"

The breach notification mentions that UH had "adopted different identification methods" since the 1990s, implying they knew SSNs were problematic for research participant identification. Yet they kept the old data anyway, creating a liability that persisted for decades until ransomware operators finally cashed in.

Perhaps most troubling is UH's decision to pay the ransom. The university frames this as a noble choice to "protect individuals whose informati

Source: Dev.to