of toronto hospital for sick children Still dealing with a cyber security incident so severe that it has been declared ‘code grey’ – meaning an IT system failure.
On Monday, the hospital said only some internal clinical and corporate systems were affected by the incident, as well as some hospital phone lines and webpages.
“All patient care continues while SickKids works to investigate and resolve the situation,” the hospital said in a statement.
“Upon learning about the incident, we immediately activated the incident management command center of the hospital and launched an investigation to determine the nature and scope of the incident. At this time, it appears that the incident only affected some internal clinical and corporate systems, as well as some hospital phone lines and webpages. Where required, downtime procedures have been activated.
It has notified the province and expert third parties to resolve the incident as quickly as possible.
For now, the public may experience difficulties calling the hospital and accessing certain webpages such as AboutKidsHealth.ca (SickKids’ health information site) and the hospital’s career application portal, the hospital said.
Due to the sensitive nature of their work, criminals have for some time targeted hospitals, believing that they are more susceptible to extortion, either because they are privately operated and therefore have money, or because They are heavily subsidized by governments and therefore have access to money.
One of the largest cyber attacks on the healthcare system in Canada occurred in 2021 on the health network of Newfoundland and Labrador. Apart from disrupting hospital services, over 200,000 files were copied From a network drive in what is widely believed to be a ransomware attack. A file may be opened every time a patient visits a hospital, so the number does not necessarily represent 200,000 people.
in may, reported news services Toronto’s Scarborough Health Network said it suffered a cyber incident five months ago. Patents including ID numbers, names, genders, dates of birth, email addresses, home addresses, OHIP numbers, lab reports, procedure details, insurance policy numbers, vaccination status, diagnosis information, as well as employee names, physician names and numbers data can be accessed.
