Ireland’s health service shut down major technology systems Friday after its network was breached in a ransomware attack.
- The Irish Health Service Executive reported that there was a significant ransomware attack on Friday.
- Non-emergency patients are told to stay home as healthcare will slow.
- The hacking comes a week after Colonial Pipeline in the US had to pay out $5m in ransom.
Ireland’s health service system shuts down major technology systems Friday after its network was breached in a ransomware attack.
“We have taken the precaution of shutting down all our IT systems to protect them from this attack and to allow us (to) fully assess the situation with our security partners," said Paul Reid, director-general of the Health Service Executive (HSE).
He said Ireland’s Covid-19 vaccination services would continue normally because they use different technology than the country’s other healthcare operations.
"We apologise for the inconvenience caused to patients and the public and will give further information as it becomes available," it added, stressing Ireland's coronavirus vaccination programme was unaffected and "going ahead as planned".
HSE added that Ireland’s ambulance service operates normally with no impact on emergency ambulance call handling and dispatch nationally.
Liz Canavan, a top official in Martin’s office, reported that the outageaffected child protection services hosted on HSE servers.
“Emergency departments are operating as normal, and if you need to attend a hospital, please do so,” she addressed at a televised Covid-19 briefing.
HSE Chief Executive told NewstalkFM that this is a "Conti human-operated ransomware attack that seeks to get access to data."
Conti ransomware was first spotted at the end of December 2019 in isolated attacks. Conti operates as a private Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) and is known for breaching enterprise networks and spreading laterally until gaining access to domain admin credentials which allow them to deploy the ransomware payloads filelessly using reflective DLL injection techniques.
Conti operators recruit hackers to deploy the ransomware in exchange for large shares of any paid ransom.
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