Ransomware Attack Disrupts Health Care Services In At Least Three States

A ransomware attack on California's health care system this week forced some of its departments to shut down and others to rely on paper records.

Prospect Medical Holdings, which operates 16 hospitals and more than 165 clinics and outpatient centers in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Southern California, announced the cyber attack on Thursday.

A spokesman for Prospect Medical could not estimate when services would return to normal on Saturday. It was not immediately clear how many sites in the system were affected.

On its website, Eastern Connecticut Health Network, a subsidiary of Prospect Medical, listed locations that will be closed until further notice, including the Medical Imaging Center, Emergency Department and Ambulatory Blood Center.

CharterCare Health Partners, a Rhode Island-based company, said on Facebook Thursday that it had to postpone some appointments and go back to paper records. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that computers also failed Crozer Health in Delaware County.

Prospect Medical Holdings, Inc. "We recently experienced a data security incident that disrupted our operations," the company said in a statement on Saturday. "After learning about this, we shut down our systems to protect it and launched an investigation with the help of third-party cybersecurity experts."

The company said it was focused on "meeting the immediate needs of our patients as we work hard to return to normal operations as soon as possible."

He did not provide details on the nature of the security breach.

Waterbury Hospital in Waterbury, Connecticut, said Saturday it continues to experience outages. He also said some outpatient imaging and diagnostic services were not available Friday or Saturday. On Thursday, he said he was relying on paper documents.

John Rigg, national advisor for cybersecurity and risk at the American Hospital Association, said cyberattacks on hospitals are becoming more common.

In 2022, One Brooklyn Health, a hospital group serving low-income areas of New York City, suffered a cyberattack that forced employees to use paper records as well. At the time, staff said it was a learning curve, given that most hospitals have been using electronic records since the 1990s and some diagnostic test results have been slower because of the hack.

CommonSpirit Health, which operates more than 140 hospitals and more than 700 medical facilities nationwide, was the target of a cyberattack last year that led to delayed surgeries, doctor visits and other delays in care, the company said NBC. And in 2020, Russian hackers launched a bounty attack against United Health Services involving at least 400 sites, making it the largest to date.

Reggie said cyberattacks are becoming more common, in part because the coronavirus pandemic has moved many health care services online.

"We rely more on cloud services and remote third parties," Riege said. "So it's all done in good faith, ultimately to improve patient care and save lives. But the unintended consequence of that is that it's greatly expanded the scope of our digital attack."

Hospitals and clinics typically use third parties to write the code and develop the technology for these systems, he said, so it's important that those third parties provide secure technology.

Ransomware attacks are more common across the country | Fox 13 Seattle