Cyberattack hobbles major hospital chain's US facilities
Universal Health Services Inc., which operates more than 250 hospitals and other clinical facilities in the U.S., blamed the outage on an unspecified IT security issue in a statement posted to its website Monday but provided no details about the incident, such as how many facilities were affected and whether patients had to be diverted to other hospitals.
The Fortune 500 company, with 90,000 employees, said patient care continues to be delivered safely and effectively and no patient or employee data appeared to have been accessed, copied or misused. The King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, company also has hospitals in the United Kingdom, but its operations in that country were not affected, a spokeswoman said Monday night.
BleepingComputer, an online cybersecurity news site, spoke to UHS employees who described ransomware with the characteristics of Ryuk, which has been widely linked to Russian cybercriminals and used against large enterprises.
Criminals have been increasingly targeting health care institutions with ransomware during the pandemic, infecting networks with malicious code that scrambles data.
Increasingly, ransomware purveyors download data from networks before encrypting targeted servers, using it for extortion.
Earlier this month, the first known fatality related to ransomware occurred in Duesseldorf, Germany, after an attack caused IT systems to fail and a critically ill patient needing urgent admission died after she had to be taken to another city for treatment.
A clinician involved in direct patient care at a Washington UHC facility described a high-anxiety scramble to handle the loss of computers and some phones. That meant medical staff could not easily see lab results, imaging scans, medication lists, and other critical pieces of information doctors rely on to make decisions.
Ransomware attacks have crippled everything from major cities to school districts, and federal officials are concerned they could be used to disrupt the current presidential election.
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