The Dusseldorf hospital ransomware attack interrupted the operation of IT systems, resulting in the death of a woman who needed urgent admission
The Dusseldorf hospital ransomware attack interrupted the operation of IT systems, resulting in the death of a woman who needed urgent admission.
The Duesseldorf hospital network was hit by a ransomware attack and infected more than 30 internal servers on September 10, last week. The attack crashed the systems, paralyzed the operations at the hospital, and emergency hospitals were hijacked in other structures while surgical procedures were postponed.
BSI had issued a warning a day before the incident asking German companies to update their Citrix network gateways for the CVE-2019-19871 vulnerability, a known entry point for the ransomware gangs.
The incident is the first-ever death reported due to the ransomware attack caused indirectly. The Duesseldorf hospital could not receive the patient who needed urgent medical care, in the middle of dealing with a ransomware attack. The patient died after being re-routed to a hospital in the city of Wuppertal, which is more than 30km away from the Duesseldorf University Hospital.
The German authorities are currently investigating the patient’s death. If the ransomware attack and the hospital downtime are found to be directly at fault for women’s death, then German police said it turn their investigation into a murder case.
The ransom note includes details to contact the attackers but did not contain any sum. RTL has speculated that the attack was not intended for the hospital but the University of Dusseldorf.
The German news outlet RTL states that the ransomware gang seems to have withdrawn it's ransom demand after German police told them the hospital had been affected, endangering the life of patients. The ransomware gang then decided to provide the decryption key and withdraw the attempt to extort.
Individual hospitals are currently being put back into operation. “If systems are disrupted over the internet, by an adversary or an accident, that can have a profound impact on patient care,” says Beau Woods, a cybersecurity advocate.
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