The Canadian Province of Newfoundland and Labrador has experienced a Cyberattack that has led to serious disruption to healthcare providers and hospitals. The attack took place on October 30th, causing regional health systems to shut down their networks and cancel thousands of medical appointments. This disruption affected health systems in Central Health, Eastern Health, Western Health, and the Labrador-Grenfell Regional Health authorities.
The IT Outage also harmed communication in the region, with the people reporting a failure to reach the health care centers or 911 through the phone. Yesterday, the Department of Health and Community Services announced that they had started research into the systems outage with the help of a handled service provider.
Returning to pen and paper
As emails are not working and doctors cannot register new patients or upload and access medical results on the database, many affected health centers have turned to use pen and paper. Affected healthcare centers have also been forced to cancel or reschedule appointments for chemotherapy, x-ray scans, surgeries, and other specialist services.
While the IT outages are not the same for all hospitals in the province, almost all of them deal with some form of disruption. The only thing that continues to operate normally is vaccinations, emergency care, and the admissions of cases that cannot be rejected.
Mostly a Ransomware Attack
While the Canadian government or healthcare systems have not revealed what type of Cyberattack they have suffered, sources have told our experts that it is ransomware. Health Minister John Haggie and Eastern Health CEO David Diamond spoke at a media conference earlier by today, stating that the incident had a ‘significant impact’ and a ‘damaged data center.’
If this turns out to be a ransomware attack, there is a good chance that data was stolen as well, including possible patient information. As for when things will return to normal status, Haggie said it could be a couple of days before all systems are up and running again. Our experts have contacted the province’s press contact with further questions but have not heard back at this time.
Canada in hackers’ crosshairs
Canada’s public assistance has been a purpose for various ransomware attacks in the past. In October 2020, Montreal’s STM public transport system was hit by RansomExx, and in December 2020, Vancouver’s Metro operator TransLink endured serious IT problems following an Egregor attack. A month later, TransLink terminated its investigation and verified that the Russian hackers had kept customer details.
