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Hardening · Verdant · 2024

Ransomware-proofed 40 hospitals.

Connected medical devices made every site a target. We segmented clinical networks, made backups immutable, and stood up 24/7 monitoring — then watched it stop a live ransomware attempt cold.

The challenge

Care can’t go offline. Attackers knew it.

Verdant’s 40 hospitals ran thousands of connected infusion pumps, imaging systems, and building controllers — most unpatchable, many invisible to IT. Flat clinical networks meant one phished workstation could reach devices that keep people alive.

Downtime wasn’t an operational metric here. It was a patient-safety metric.

Clinical network monitoring wall during the hospital hardening program
CLINICAL NETWORK — SEGMENTED & MONITORED

Approach

Segment, back up, watch everything.

Segment

Clinical micro-segmentation

Medical devices were isolated into monitored enclaves with strictly defined clinical flows — care workflows untouched, lateral movement eliminated.

Back up

Immutable recovery

Backup chains were rebuilt with immutability and offline copies, then restore-tested per facility — because an untested backup is a rumor.

Watch

Always-on monitoring

Continuous telemetry tuned to clinical environments, with on-call escalation paths drilled alongside hospital incident teams.

0Files encrypted
1%Uptime kept
0Facilities
Analyst verifying immutable backup integrity after the blocked attack
RECOVERY VERIFICATION — IMMUTABLE BACKUPS CONFIRMED

Outcome

The attack came. It failed.

Months after handover, a ransomware affiliate breached a vendor VPN and deployed encryptors inside one hospital’s IT network. Segmentation held the clinical enclaves, monitoring flagged the blast radius in minutes, and immutable backups made the ransom demand irrelevant.

“The clearest security report I’ve read in 20 years. My board finally understood our risk — and signed off on the budget.” — Sofia Lund, CTO, Verdant Health

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Protect systems that can’t go down.

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