Universal Health Services Inc., which operates more than 400 hospitals and other clinical care facilities, said in a short statement p osted to its website Monday that its network was offline and doctors and nurses were resorting to back-up processes including paper records.
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 posts echoed the alarm of a clinician at a UHS facility in Washington, D.C., who described to The Associated Press a mad scramble, including anxiety over determining which patients might be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19.
Ransomware is a growing scourge in which hackers infect networks with malicious code that scrambles data and then demand payment to restore services.
Increasingly, ransomware purveyors are downloading data from networks they infiltrate 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.
The company based in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, did not immediately respond to emails seeking more information, such as whether patients had to be diverted to other hospitals.
The Washington clinician described a high-anxiety scramble to handle the loss of computers and some phones starting Sunday.
The person, involved in direct patient care, was not authorized to speak publicly and described the chaotic situation on condition of anonymity.
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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