Quote:Scripps Health, a hospital network based in San Diego, was hit by a cyberattack over the weekend, forcing some critical-care patients to be diverted, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Scripps acknowledged the attack in a statement but didn’t specify whether it was a ransomware incident. It’s also unknown whether the adversaries compromised any patient records or other sensitive data.
The paper reported that an email notice from county emergency-services coordinator Jaime Pitner said that all four of Scripps’ main hospitals, in Chula Vista, Encinitas, La Jolla and San Diego, implemented emergency-care diversions. Stroke, trauma and heart-attack patients were sent to other medical centers, it said.
Emergencies being sent elsewhere after a ransomware attack is not unheard-of: In September n September, employees at Universal Health Services (UHS), a Fortune-500 owner of a nationwide network of hospitals, reported widespread outages that resulted in delayed lab results, a fallback to pen and paper, and patients being diverted to other hospitals. The culprit turned out to be the Ryuk ransomware, which locked up hospital systems for days.
“No patients died tonight in our [emergency room] but I can surely see how this could happen in large centers due to delay in patient care,” a Reddit user identifying themselves as a nurse wrote at the time.
Earlier that month, a ransomware attack at a Dusseldorf University hospital in Germany resulted in emergency-room diversions to other hospitals. According to a report by the Ministry of Justice of the State North Rhine-Westphalia, a patient died who had to be taken to a more distant hospital in Wuppertal because of the attack on the clinic’s servers. The initial charges of homicide that were filed in the case were however later dropped.
Read more: Scripps Cyberattack Causes Widespread Hospital Outages | Threatpost
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