Whether an ethical hacker or unethical hacker, the threat actor seeks information for purposes only s/he understands.  Threat actors are continuous learners, expanding skills to select impossible hard targets, to engage tractable soft targets or to solve mankind greatest challenges. Qui-Gon Jinn said, “There’s always a bigger fish.” The more notorious hacker is the black hat, and the less fiendish hackers are gray, red and white hats.  How is information about targeted computers and networks gathered?  Targets are learned through passive and active reconnaissance, locating IP addresses, identifying open transmission control protocol (TCP) and user datagram protocol (UDP) ports and uncovering versions of operating systems (OS).  Some common methodologies in reconnaissance are packet sniffers, ping sweeps, port scans and information queries.  Passive reconnaissance, unlike active reconnaissance, is not detectable.  The first step of reconnaissance is to begin building a replica of the targeted network, computers, users, etc. Whenever reconnaissance is promising, it interlaces, intercepts and exploits. Hancock Regional Hospital in Indiana computer system is being held for ransom according to CBS4 Web and as of 12 January 2018.   The healthcare industry was the most hacked industry in 2015 according to the 2015 NetDiligence Survey.  Although the report is fairly new, hackers are very knowledgeable on healthcare reconnaissance. An objective may have been exaltation, but money collection is a priority.  Cryptocurrency is changing how online transactions are handled.   In 2014 Community Health Systems  in 29 states and in 206 hospitals had 4.5 million patient’s personal identifiable information (PII) stolen by hackers.  In 2015 Anthem Inc., the second largest health insurance company in the U.S., had 80 million customer’s PII stolen by “skilled” hackers. In 2016 Phoenix-based Banner Health was ranked number one for the largest healthcare breach of 2016 according to HIPAA Journal’s article named “Largest Healthcare Data Breaches of 2016.”  The cyber attack netted 3.7 million patient’s PII and payment data of food and beverage processing.  In Nate Lord’s summation of the ten largest healthcare breaches of all time, Phoenix-based Banner Health was listed at number 9.  Maybe reconnaissance is noisy because you’ve heard it before.

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