New Zealand Hospitals Under Prolonged IT Outage From Ransom Hack Patients are being asked to arrive at appointments with paper documents and banks are urged to honor automatic payments to hospital staff.
Bloomberg | May 25, 2021
Jamie Tarabay (Bloomberg) Systems are still down a week after a ransomware attack disrupted the IT network of five hospitals in the New Zealand district of Waikato, and concerns remain that private patient information may have been exposed.
Patients are being asked to arrive at appointments with paper documents and banks are urged to honor automatic payments to hospital staff who were either underpaid or not paid at all, a week after the Waikato District Health Board said it experienced a full outage of its information services.
Ransomware Attack Still Disrupting IT Systems of New Zealand Hospitals
Systems are still down a week after a ransomware attack disrupted the IT network of five hospitals in the New Zealand district of Waikato, and concerns remain that private patient information may have been exposed.
Patients are being asked to arrive at appointments with paper documents and banks are urged to honor automatic payments to hospital staff who were either underpaid or not paid at all, a week after the Waikato District Health Board said it experienced a full outage of its information services.
By Tuesday, manual processes were implemented to support the backlog of patients while the public was reminded to “seek alternative avenues of treatment unless they are critically unwell.”
A general view of St Luke’s Hospital which has been affected by a ransomware attack, in Rathgar, Dublin. Last week, Ireland’s hospitals were forced to shut down many of their computers after the hackers gained access to the health service’s systems, encrypted patient data so that it was inaccessible and demanded payment to unlock the files. AP
A day after threatening to publicly release patient data, the hackers who targeted Ireland’s health service offered a decryption key that they said could be used to unlock computers infected with ransomware.
While seeming to offer an olive branch – sharing a link to download the decryption key – the group reiterated its threats to disclose patient data unless Irish authorities paid the US$20mil (RM82.81mil) ransom demand.
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