A ransomware attack on the servers of Campbell County Health(CCH) on Friday morning is said to have led the disruption of patient services from the past four days. Hospital authorities confirmed that the attack was a ransomware variant locking down all stored data from access.
As per the media update released early this morning, the malware reportedly hit the Gillette, Wyoming based healthcare at 3:30 AM on Friday and caused serious service disruptions causing digital troubles for outpatient labs, respiratory therapy sessions, and radiology examination.
Since then many of the surgeries were postponed to Sunday as CCH stopped admitting new patients. However, the situation on Sunday did not improve as the data couldn’t be recovered.
Patients who needed emergency care and walked into the healthcare were diverted to other service providers in the vicinity.
But the good news is that the communication systems like Phone were still operational and a partial recovery of email systems was also possible by Sunday evening.
All local and state law enforcement agencies have been informed about the incident and the data restoration works is under progress.
Whether the CCH staff are bowing down to the demands of hackers or going for data recovery from backups is yet to be known.
Note- Ransomware and another variant of cyberattacks such as phishing have increased in recent years on US public and private entities. So, the law enforcement authorities are advising the companies to maintain data backups on a regular note, have threat monitoring solutions in place and never pay a ransom to hackers as it encourages crime.
