A public-health agency in central Illinois has had to retreat to social media to update residents about the ongoing spread of the new coronavirus after a ransomware attack disabled its main website and briefly cut off employees from medical files.
Workers at the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District discovered Tuesday that they were victims of a cyberattack, which was confirmed as ransomware the following day. While the website has been disabled, the agency’s email accounts, environmental health records and patient records were not impacted, having been moved to a cloud-based backup storage system, according to the local News-Gazette newspaper.
The ransomware has been identified as NetWalker, a relatively new form of malware that targets enterprises running on Microsoft Windows 10.
Since the attack, the health district has moved most announcements related to the coronavirus to its Facebook page, and has also established a backup website with alerts about the pandemic while it restores its main page, a process that Julie Pryde, the agency’s director, told the News-Gazette will take about one week.
“The public needs to know it’s being taken care of, and we’re still functioning,” she told the paper.
According to the Illinois Department of Public Health, 25 people in the state have tested positive for COVID-19, though most appear to be ..
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