Adams Memorial Hospital has admitted that few of its servers were attacked by hackers with ransomware on January 11th this year. Ransomware is nothing but a kind of malware which encrypts all the data in the database and offers access only when a ransom is paid to the hackers or ransomware spreaders.
The healthcare which is being run by Adams Health Network (AHN) is yet to disclose details of the ransom request and whether they are ready to pay the hackers.
According to Susan Sefton, an administration employee in-charge discovered the ransomware attack for the first time in early hours of Jan 12th when she tried to access some files which seemed suspicious. First, the network became too slow and then went blank with a message “Sorry you can’t access the files as they are encrypted”.
Sefton immediately brought it to the notice of the administrators who launched an investigation further to discover that their database was reining under the effect of ransomware.
As the patient history or Appointment scheduled remained inaccessible, Adams Health Medical Offices were closed on Friday. And this move is said to have impacted the health checkup of almost 80 patients on that day.
Jo Ellen Eidam, the CEO of Adams Memorial Hospital accepted that few of the servers of is health care was under the influence of Ransomware attack. But he failed to disclose further information.
Very recently, Hancock Memorial Hospital disclosed that it paid $55,000 worth of Bitcoins cryptocurrency to hackers as they have encrypted their entire database. Since restoration from backups could take days or even weeks, the IT staff decided to bow down to the demands of the ransomware spreaders.
The staff of Adams Health Network is still not sure on how to proceed with the situation. Some reliable sources reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders say that the hospital network has backups for disaster recovery. And so might choose not to bow down to the demands of the hackers.
More details will be updated shortly!
