Ransomware forces hospital to turn away ambulances

Ransomware scumbags have caused a vital hospital to turn away ambulances after infecting its computer systems with malware.

The University Medical Center in Lubbock, west Texas, has been forced to severely limit operations following the cyberattack. The non-profit hospital was hit on Friday by ransomware operators. Services are still being disrupted, although most emergency care facilities are operating at present.

"Out of an abundance of caution, we will continue to temporarily divert incoming emergency and non-emergency patients via ambulance to nearby health facilities until this issue is resolved," the US hospital said in a statement.

"We are making accommodations wherever possible to minimize any disruption to our patients and our critical services. Our investigation into this incident remains ongoing and will take time to complete."

UMC is a level-one trauma hospital - meaning it's capable of handling the most seriously ill patients and maintains a team of specialists around the clock. The center is the only such hospital in nearly 400 miles and any degradation to its service could be life threatening.

The hospital said it noticed unusual activity on one of its IT networks and disconnected it from the main computer system. It has called in an unspecified third party to help fix the situation. A hospital spokesperson declined to comment further.

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Hopefully the center is working with the FBI, which not only can sometimes help recover ransomware-scrambled systems, but will even help beat down the criminals on price if the victim decides to pay up, as FBI director Christopher Wray explained earlier this month.

According to Sophos, while the total number of ransomware attacks is falling slowly overall, when it comes to healthcare, they are rising. In the past two years, two-thirds of healthcare facilities surveyed by the infosec shop suffered at least one ransomware infection and over half had paid criminals to regain control of their networks.

"While we’ve seen the rate of ransomware attacks reach a kind of 'homeostasis' or even declining across industries, attacks against healthcare organizations continue to intensify, both in number and scope," said Sophos field CTO John Shier.

"The highly sensitive nature of healthcare information and need for accessibility will always place a bullseye on the healthcare industry from cybercriminals. Unfortunately, cybercriminals have learned that few healthcare organizations are prepared to respond to these attacks, demonstrated by increasingly longer recovery times. These attacks can have immense ripple effects." ®