A harmful ransomware attack has caused an IT outage at a Texas hospital, which has resulted in the need to redirect patients to other facilities.
A UMC Healthcare System hospital in the city of Lubbock in the west of the Lone Star State first reported the issue last Thursday, with the impact still continuing to be felt.
Not the first cyberattack to be directed at medical organizations in the last few months, a second health center in Texas has now also begun to report its own IT issues.
IT Systems Hit by Ransomware
The news of the outage was originally reported on the website of local newspaper the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.
At that point, it said that UMC was diverting both emergency and non-emergency patients to other health facilities nearby while it tried to get to the bottom of the issue.
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The hospital – which is a regional Level I Trauma Center, meaning it operates 24/7 and provides total care for every aspect of injury – said that it had “detected unusual activity within our IT systems,” which they determined to be “connected to a ransomware incident”.
The knock-on effect was that other local centers had to take their own measures to handle the sudden influx of additional patients. Covenant Health System roughly 1 mile south, for example, said that it would accept all patients to the emergency department but that anybody whose medical issues wasn’t “emergent” (e.g. minor infections, mild allergic reactions, cuts, sprains, bites, etc.) should go instead to a urgent care clinic.
Services Restored But Diversion Continues
On Monday, UMC confirmed that it had made progress through the weekend to restore services following, what it called, a “cybersecurity incident”.
It reported that healthcare facilities such as its emergency centers and physician clinics remained open and that it was now accepting patients via ambulance, but that redirecting of certain patients would continue:
“However, out of an abundance of caution, the Emergency Center continues to divert a select number of patients until all UMC resources are fully functioning.”
It also said that the investigation into the ransomware incident was still ongoing.
Second Facility Potentially Hit
Following the confirmed cyberattack at UMC, a second Texan healthcare facility began to report its own IT issues yesterday.
The Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) said in a Facebook post that electronic resources were not available, which would mean “limited clinical operations and no academic operations at TTUHSC campuses and sites”.
At the time of writing, it has not been confirmed whether TTUHSC’s IT outage has been caused by a cyberattack.
Cyberattack Scourge
A report released last year suggested that cyberattacks targeting government and the public sector were on the rise – that’s seriously concerning when you see the kind of impact it can have on organizations like UMC, and when you consider the amount of sensitive data held by such entities.
A little over a year ago, a cyberattack on IBM’s MOVEit app exposed data of 4 million US patients.
While the health records of 12.9 million Australians were exposed when MediSecure’s database was breached in July.
