Healthcare

September 1, 2023

Two major hospitals serving thousands in upstate New York are struggling to recover from cyberattacks that were announced last week.

The two facilities, Carthage Area Hospital and Claxton-Hepburn Medical Center, serve an area with more than 200,000 people in Jefferson, Lewis and St. Lawrence Counties. For two weeks, the hospitals have been dealing with a cybersecurity incident that forced them to divert ambulances to other local hospitals and reschedule most appointments.

Richard Duvall, chief executive officer of both hospitals, said “no demand for a ransom has been made.”

June 16, 2023

An attack against a US cancer center in June 2023 rendered digital services unavailable, limiting the center’s patient care capabilities.The group calling itself TimisoaraHackerTeam (THT), is not widely known but it has a history of attacking medical facilities by exploiting known vulnerabilities and using a living-off-the-land approach to minimize detection.

ASPR Healthcare and Public Health Sector issued a Cybersecurity Notification and warning on June 16, 2023: “Even among hackers, there is often a code of conduct not to attack hospitals or other HPH organizations that could cause physical harm,” HHS stated. “However, in their purposeful targeting of the healthcare sector, groups like THT abstain from that moral code.”

November 9, 2023

Tri-City Medical Center is diverting ambulance traffic to other hospitals Thursday as it copes with a cybersecurity attack that has forced it to declare “an internal disaster” as workers scramble to contain the damage and protect patient records. The Oceanside facility’s management confirmed the situation in a brief statement, indicating that the hospital’s emergency department remains “prepared to manage emergency cases” that may arrive in private vehicles and is “working with our other health system partners to ensure the provision of health care for our community.”

On Monday, 13 November, ambulance deliveries remain diverted from its emergency department and elective procedures remain canceled as the medical provider deals with the fallout of an attack on its digital assets and continues to operate in a state of “internal disaster.”

September 5, 2023

McLaren Healthcare in Michigan reported outages affecting billing and electronic health record systems. According to the Detroit Free Press, McLaren had to shut down the computer network at 14 different facilities — a situation that got so bad that employees had to communicate through their personal phones. The Black Cat/AlphV ransomware gang claimed to have stolen 6 TB of data.

UPDATE: 13 November: McLaren reports Black Cat stole data on 2.2 million patients.