CHICAGO — A Chicago kids’s hospital has been pressured to take its networks offline after an unspecified digital assault, limiting entry to medical information and hampering communication by cellphone or electronic mail because the center of final week.
Lurie Youngsters’s Hospital initially described the problem Wednesday as a community outage. On Thursday, officers launched public statements saying the hospital had taken its networks offline as a part of its response to a “cybersecurity matter.”
“We’re taking this very severely, investigating with the help of main consultants, and are working in collaboration with regulation enforcement businesses,” the hospital mentioned in an announcement Thursday. “As Illinois’ main supplier for pediatric care, our overarching precedence is to proceed offering secure, high quality care to our sufferers and the communities we serve. Lurie Youngsters’s is open and offering care to sufferers with as restricted disruption as attainable.”
On Friday, the hospital introduced a separate name heart for sufferers to get prescriptions refilled or ask non-urgent questions on care or appointments.
Media representatives for the hospital didn’t instantly return messages from The Related Press on Monday in search of extra data, together with whether or not the assault was attributable to ransomware. The extortion-style assault is fashionable amongst these in search of monetary acquire by locking information, information or different essential data then demanding cash to launch it again to the proprietor.
A 2023 report by the Division of Well being and Human Providers warned of dramatic will increase in digital assaults on well being care and public well being entities in recent times, inflicting delayed or disrupted take care of sufferers throughout the nation.
Well being care suppliers aren’t alone; state courts, county or state governments and schools all have struggled to get well from cyber-based assaults.
The newest annual report for Lurie Youngsters’s mentioned the hospital handled round 260,000 sufferers final yr. Chicago-area pediatrician practices that work with the hospital even have reported being unable to entry digital medical information due to the assault.
