Ireland's health service operator shut down all its IT systems on Friday to protect itself from a ‘significant ransomware attack’. While it maintained that its coronavirus vaccination system was unaffected, medical appointments were cancelled.
The head of the Health Service Executive said, shutting the system was a precaution and they were trying to assess how this would affect other related services. Rotunda, a Dublin maternity hospital cancelled all outpatient appointments on Friday except for those of women who are 36 weeks pregnant and need urgent care. Fergal Malone, the master of the Rotunda, said, all patients were safe and they were able to function with help of the old-fashioned paper-based record-keeping system.
At Cork University hospital, the oncology department was affected.
Paul Reid, the Health Service Executive chief executive told The Guardian, there had been a “human-operated” attempt to access data stored on central servers for a presumed ransom. “There has been no ransom demand at this stage. The key thing is to contain the issue. We are in the containment phase,” he added.
“The vaccination programme continues thankfully, it's a separate system,” he said. The registration portal, however, has been taken down, which means, patients would need to go to walk-in centres to be tested for the coronavirus.
In ransomware attacks, users are typically left out locked out of their systems; computers are affected by malicious software and there is demand for ransom to be paid to restore computer functions.