New York
CNN
—
A community of three hospitals in Brooklyn, New York, has needed to work off paper charts for weeks following a cyberattack on its pc methods in late November, the hospital group’s chief government informed CNN Monday.
The hack affected “medical purposes,” together with “these used for imaging and different vital providers,” however lots of these purposes have been restored, One Brooklyn Well being CEO LaRay Brown mentioned in an e mail.
It’s an instance of how hacking incidents have continued to hamper hospitals because the coronavirus pandemic drags on — and of how recovering from the hacks could be painstaking and disruptive for hospital workers.
One Brooklyn Well being operates Brookdale College Hospital Medical Middle, Interfaith Medical Middle and Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Middle.
One workers member at Brookdale informed the New York Occasions that, due to the hack, diagnostic imaging on the medical middle needed to be despatched out to a 3rd social gathering supplier fairly than finished in-house.
“No sufferers have been adversely effected,” Brown informed CNN in an e mail Monday, including that the hospitals stay open to sufferers. “We proceed to supply look after our sufferers utilizing downtime procedures for which our clinicians and directors have been skilled.”
Greater than 80% of the pc workstations that One Brooklyn Well being medical doctors and workers use to assist hospital operations have been restored, Brown mentioned. Hospital directors have begun placing some medical knowledge into sufferers’ digital medical data, she added.
Brown didn’t reply questions on whether or not One Brooklyn Well being was coping with a ransomware assault, which locks up pc methods till a ransom is paid. However loads of different hospitals throughout the nation have needed to take care of such extortion makes an attempt.
One IT administrator at a 100-bed hospital in Florida recounted to CNN how he shut down the power’s pc methods in January to stop a ransomware assault from spreading all through the hospital.
Many hospitals in rural or poor areas would not have the sources to defend their networks from hackers.
“Cyber security and resilience can’t be allowed to interrupt throughout socioeconomic traces,” mentioned Joshua Corman, who helped lead a taskforce on the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company to guard coronavirus analysis from hacking. “Nearly all of US hospitals are target-rich, however cyber poor.”
The cybersecurity of pc networks that may have an effect on human security “must grow to be a nationwide precedence,” mentioned Corman, now a vp at cybersecurity agency Claroty.
Brookdale Hospital is positioned within the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, one of many poorest areas in New York Metropolis. It was so overwhelmed and determined for sources on the top of the coronavirus pandemic in New York that one physician informed CNN on the time that his hospital had grow to be “a struggle zone.”
– CNN’s Sarah Boxer contributed to this report
