It’s never a normal day at Chicago’s Ann & Robert Lurie Children’s Hospital. Patients are still being treated, but the entire facility is making do without phone, email or computer services due to what it calls a “cybersecurity issue.”
“We take this matter very seriously and are investigating with the assistance of leading experts and working collaboratively with law enforcement. As part of our response to this issue, we are offline,” the hospital said in a statement Thursday night.
FBI officials said the agency is aware of cybersecurity issues affecting Lurie Children’s Hospital and is providing assistance.
Ms. Lurie established a call center to serve the needs of patients’ families and community health care providers. If you have any questions or concerns, including non-emergency patient requests, information about scheduled appointments, and prescription refill requests, we encourage you to call 1-800-543-7362.
Call center hours are Monday through Friday from 8am to 8pm, Saturday from 8am to 5pm, and Sunday from 8am to 12pm.
Hospitals are popular targets for hackers, according to cybersecurity experts. A recent study by Checkpoint Security found that in terms of the number of weekly attacks, hospitals rank third after educational or research systems and government or military systems. “They’re targeting hospitals because hospitals pay,” said Checkpoint’s Pete Nicoletti.
“Typically, they have a huge incentive to act quickly and work toward paying the ransom,” said John Bromfield of Vistrada Consulting Services. “When lives are at stake, you have to act quickly,” he says.
Nicoletti said hospitals are targeted by bots not only because they pay the ransom, but because their data is valuable to hackers on the dark web, and patient data is sold to hackers. , because hackers can use what appears to be stolen data to launch their own phishing attacks. hospital.
Experts say there are many ways hackers can exploit hospital systems, but they are most often targeted by malicious emails. They may also utilize connected devices such as MRI scanners or heart monitors that may not have adequate protection.
Nicoletti said nearly all hospitals keep backups of their data, but recovery could take time. “What I’m saying is recovery can take days or weeks, so a lot of hospitals use floppy drives to do their backups and send them by stagecoach to some cave.” he says.
As of Friday afternoon, the luriechildrens.org website was still down. “This website uses security services to protect against online attacks,” the page says.
