Unfortunate Cyber Hack at A Hospital
Just recently, Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago suffered a huge cyberattack which caused extreme frustration for parents’ patients, and faculty. This attack was made on every electronic device in the building, phones, computers, internet, etc. This attack made it difficult for having access to important records of the hospital.
Since this attack, only a few patients have actually been able to have their appointments made, but majority have not. And this is extremely stressful for the parents of these patients. “Hospitals and pretty much everything we rely on nowadays depends on computers, and servers and cloud services. And those can be disrupted by cyberattacks,” said Robin Berthier, co-founder of Network Perception. Additionally, these cyberattacks can certainly range in severity, from different malwares, to just hackers trying to cause chaos.
This outage has been extremely hard on many people at the hospital. There is so many patients that require care, and not being able to properly communicate is stressful. However, this is not the first attack. Two months prior to this attack, a similar incident happened to Saint Anthony’s Hospital in Chicago. “The life of people is actually at play,” said Berthier.
How Is the Hospital Fixing This?
It was said by the hospital themselves, that they have taken this matter very seriously. Additionally, they have mentioned that, “as part of our response to this matter, we have proactively taken network systems offline,” said the hospital affected.
Some experts have suggested for the hospital to get better cyber security to avoid future incidents from happening. Clare McGlave. doctoral student at the University of Minnesota, is part of a team that is trying to study cyberattacks. She has said that cyber attackers tend to hack hospitals the most because they are the ones that try to resolve the issue as soon as possible. Which means they can strike again in a short amount of time.
“New York is definitely leading the charge as far as requirements for cybersecurity in hospitals, which is great, because I think we’ve learned that these cyberattacks are happening, and they’re going to keep happening,” said McGlave. Lurie’s Children’s Hospital is trying to bring the services back online as quickly as possible. In the meantime, they have stablished a call center to address non-urgent patient requests.
Written By Erika Cano
CBS News: Network outage at Lurie Children’s Hospital continues following cybersecurity attack
ABC 7 Chicago: Lurie Children’s outage: Hospital network down for 6th day, cyberattack investigation ongoing
Book Club Chicago: Lurie Children’s Hospital Offline For Days Amid Cyber Attack
Top and Featured Image Courtesy of Dennis Skley Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
Inset Image Courtesy of SIM USA Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
