INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
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Hospitals have become a popular target for cyber-criminals
A
cyber-attack on a hospital in Rouen last week caused "very long delays in care", reports the AFP news agency.Medical staff at the French
city's University Hospital Centre (CHU) were forced to abandon PCs as ransomware had made them unusable, a spokesman said.Instead, staff
returned to the "old-fashioned method of paper and pencil", said head of communications Remi Heym.No patients were endangered as a result of
the cyber-attack, the hospital said, in a statement published on Facebook.The 1,300-bed hospital has not revealed details about the strain
of ransomware with which it was infected
It said servers and many desktop PCs were rendered out of action by the attack, leaving staff to handle appointments by phone, issuing
written prescriptions and reports.No medical or personal data has gone missing as a result of the attack, according to the hospital.France's
national cyber-crime agency, ANSSI, helped limit the scale of the outbreak, France's Le Monde newspaper reported
The paper reports that the agency also assisted with cleaning up computers infected by the virus, re-installing software and recovering
encrypted files.Media playback is unsupported on your deviceMedia captionTechnology explained: what is ransomware?The hospital stated it
would not pay any ransom to have its files restored, adding that all its systems should be returned to normal by this weekend.A formal
investigation into who was behind the ransomware has been initiated by French police.Le Monde reported that ransomware attacks on French
hospitals were rare, but said two other establishments had been hit in recent years
Hospitals have become a favourite target of cyber-attackers because the patient data they hold is highly valuable and the consequences of
the data becoming inaccessible can be life-threatening.The biggest outbreak was in August this year, which impacted 120 hospitals and
offices forming the Ramsay private hospital group
That organisation reportedly paid the ransom to unlock computers and restore encrypted files.In May 2017, a cyber-attack crippled large
parts of the NHS - 47 trusts were affected and seven had to temporarily close their doors in A-E to ambulances.
