CommonSpirit Health, the second-largest U.S. nonprofit health care organization, is suffering from security “issues” that have forced it to divert ambulance routes and shut down electronic medical records systems at hospitals across the country.
Headquartered in Chicago, CommonSpirit Health has more than 1,000 facilities and 140 hospitals in 21 states. This week, the company encountered an “IT security issue” affecting “some” institutions. The nonprofit posted a very brief notice on its official website that some of its systems, including “electronic health records (EHR) and other systems,” were taken offline as a result.
“Our facility follows current system outage protocols and has taken steps to minimize disruption,” the statement said. “We take our responsibility for the cybersecurity of our IT systems very seriously. We have rescheduled some patient appointments as a result of this issue. .”
Media reports said the chaos began on Monday. As a result, CommonSpirit shut down its electronic health record system, canceled prescription refills, and rescheduled patient appointments at CommonSpirit hospitals/healthcare facilities in Nebraska, Washington, Illinois and Tennessee. As a result of the incident, ambulances in Des Moines, Iowa’s capital, were also forced to reroute patients to other unaffected hospitals and clinics in Iowa City.
CommonSpirit has not provided further details on the source of the problem, nor has it disclosed how many facilities were affected, whether any patient data was stolen in the incident, and whether ransomware was the culprit. Foreign media has made a request for comment on the matter, and CommonSpirit has not yet responded.
Already, information security sources say the incident has all the hallmarks of a ransomware attack. Twitter user Kevin Beaumont said in a quoted tweet that the IT crash was “definitely due to ransomware.”
CNBC, citing a person familiar with the remediation of the incident, said that CommonSpirit suffered a ransomware attack.
At least 15 U.S. healthcare systems have been hit by ransomware attacks so far this year, and 61 hospitals have been affected, said Brett Callow, an analyst at Austrian anti-malware maker Emsisoft. In at least 12 of those infections, malicious hackers successfully seized sensitive data, including protected health information.
Speaking of the CommonSpirit incident, Callow said that “statistically, the most likely root cause of this type of incident is a ransomware attack.”
Callow also recalled last year’s ransomware attack on healthcare organization Scripps, which cost more than $100 million in security fixes. Terribly, Scripps has only five hospitals and 19 other facilities, nowhere near the scale of CommonSpirit’s medical “kingdom.”
In 2021, a total of 1,203 health care providers in the United States have been attacked by malicious hackers.
Callow concluded, “There is a lot of debate about whether the current cyberattack situation is worsening or improving. But in any case, in recent weeks, the second largest U.S. district and the second largest nonprofit health care system have been hit by So no matter how we look at it, we can’t conclude that things are improving.”
As a result, data breaches affect even every enterprises and organizations, much alone ordinary businesses and individuals. So businesses and people must take proactive steps to secure data. To avoid all hazards, data may be backed up for disaster recovery. Data protection solutions are now plentiful and simple to use. As an example, consider the popular virtual machine backup. Virtual machines may run many operating systems concurrently, saving both physical and virtual resources. VMware Backup, Xenserver Backup, Hyper-V Backup, and other virtual machine backup tools are now widely utilized.
Santosh Kumar is a Professional SEO and Blogger, With the help of this blog he is trying to share top 10 lists, facts, entertainment news from India and all around the world.