The string of damaging cyberattacks on U.S. healthcare facilities continued this week with an incident that took down a Massachusetts hospital’s electronic medical records system and forced the facility to turn away ambulances on Christmas Day.
Anna Jaques Hospital, about 35 miles north of Boston, was “open to all patients” Friday as it continued to recover from the attack, a spokesperson said. said WCVB-TV. According to reports, the hospital began accepting ambulances again on December 26.
The facility, part of the Beth Israel-Lahey Health System, has not released details about the attack, which is believed to have begun on Dec. 24. A spokesperson did not respond to questions from Recorded Future News about the nature of the incident.
“We appreciate the community’s patience as we work through this investigation,” the spokesperson said.
Anna Jaques Hospital and Beth Israel-Lahey have not released any information on social media regarding the incident.
Hospital officials said they contacted cybersecurity professionals as part of their incident response, according to a report Thursday by the Daily News of Newburyport.
The attack and its aftermath are all too familiar to anyone following cyberattacks in healthcare. A few days before Christmas, a hospital near Kansas City, Missouri, was forced to transfer patients to other facilities.
Earlier in December, a Seattle cancer center not only faces ransomware attackbut had the added burden of knowing that cybercriminals had also extorted individual patients.
The attacks also disrupted the Thanksgiving holiday in hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
This trend also includes global examples: a healthcare provider in Australia announced on December 22 that they had suffered a data breach.
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Joe Warminsky is the editor-in-chief of Recorded Future News. He has more than 25 years of experience as an editor and writer in the Washington, DC area. Most recently, he helped lead CyberScoop for over five years. Before that, he was a digital editor at WAMU 88.5, NPR’s Washington affiliate, and he spent more than a decade editing congressional coverage for CQ Roll Call.