Major ransomware attacks are scary, but against hospitals, they are even worse. One notable attack in August 2021 forced Ohio’s Memorial Health System emergency room to shut down (patients were diverted to other hospitals). In all hospital attacks, the health, safety, privacy and lives of patients face risk. But this incident also shows that whether targets are hospitals or any other kind of organization, the time and money spent preventing attacks is almost always worth it.
But what do you do if protective measures fail? What can be done once an attack is already happening?
One health care IT director set a fantastic example of what to do when an active ransomware attack was detected.
His name is Jamie Hussey, and he works for Jackson Hospital in Florida, one of the dozens of hospitals to have been targeted for ransomware attacks in the U.S. recently. It all started near midnight on a Sunday night in early January. Staff in the emergency room called IT to say doctors couldn’t access patient charting records. Hussey found that ransomware had infected the charting software, which an outside vendor maintained.
All IT departments should study what happened next as an example of what to do right.
How to Contain a Ransomware Attack
Hussey quickly urged radical action. Shut the entire hospital’s computer systems down right away, he urged. They complied. Under a planned contingency called downtime procedures, hospital staff started using pen an ..
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