Imagine a scenario where you have a medical emergency, you head to the hospital, and it is shut down. On a Friday morning in September, this hypothetical became a reality for a community in northeast Wyoming.
Campbell County Health reported a systemwide crippling of their computers that affected its flagship hospital and nearly 20 clinics located in the city of Gillette. For eight hours, the hospital’s emergency department was forced to transfer patients even though the next nearest hospital was located 70 miles away. The health care system stopped admitting new patients, labs were shuttered and some surgeries were postponed. It took 17 days to restore normal order.
The cause was ransomware, an increasingly frequent form of digital breach that doubled across industries in the first quarter of 2019, according to McAfee Labs. Today, this brand of cyberattack and other hacks plague America’s health care providers.
But you may be surprised to learn that your health could also be affected, long after hackers release their hostages — your electronic medical records.
New research finds that at hospitals that experienced a data breach, the death rate among heart attack patients increased in the months and years afterward. This increased mortality doesn’t appear to be due to the perpetrators themselves — the hackers are not controlling the allocation of medications or doctors. Rather the issue may lie with how health care systems adjust their cybersecurity after an attack, according to a study published in October ..
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