Five Ontario hospitals affected by a recent ransomware attack, along with their shared IT provider, are warning patients and staff that their data may be published.
The attack caused an outage of some online services at Bluewater Health, Chatham-Kent Health Alliance, Erie Shores HealthCare, Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare and Windsor Regional Hospital on Oct. 23.
Get weekly health news
Affected hospitals have been forced to postpone and reschedule many surgeries and appointments.
The hospitals and TransForm, a non-profit group tasked with overseeing the hospitals’ I-T systems, say an investigation involving “leading cybersecurity experts” has determined certain patient, employee and professional staff data has been taken and may be released publicly.
- Ontario government home care vendor paid ransom to regain access to its servers: report
- Concerns over capacity at Vernon hospital psych ward after young man’s death
- Manitoba government proposes health charter but Opposition questions effectiveness
- Nova Scotia only faith-based hospital to end religious sponsorship
They say the hospital organizations are working to restore systems, and updates related to the restoration of systems is expected in next week week.
The group says its working closely with law enforcement including local police departments, Ontario Provincial Police, INTERPOL and FBI, and it has notified all relevant regulatory organizations including the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner.
Comments
Want to discuss? Please read our Commenting Policy first.