Ireland’s national health and social services provider, the Health Service Executive (HSE), has been forced to shut down its entire IT system following a ransomware attack.
The shutdown, which was done as a precaution, has led to outpatient medical appointments being postponed or cancelled.
However, HSE Chief Executive Paul Reid told Irish national broadcaster RTE that the country’s vaccination programme hadn’t been impacted by the cyber attack.
"The vaccination programme continues thankfully, it's a separate system,” he said.
Reid described the attack as “very sophisticated” and “not just the standard attack”.
“It is impacting all of our national and local systems that would be involved in all of our core services," he added. The perpetrator has not been named and HSE was not immediately available for comment.
The ransomware attack on HSE immediately drew comparisons to a similar incident that had affected its UK counterpart. Commenting on the news, Orange Cyberdefense UK director Stuart Reed said that the attack “comes almost exactly four years from the 12 May 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack on the NHS, which devastated services”.
The attack, which took place during the week between 12 and 18 May 2017, is thought to have affected over 200,000 computer systems across the world, disrupted the services of one-third of the UK's hospital trusts, and approximately 8% of GP clinics. It's believed that around 19,000 hospital appointments were cancelled as a result.
RELATED RESOURCE
2021 state of email security report: Ransomware on the rise
Securing the enterprise in the COVID world
A subsequent investigation conducted by the Department of Health and Social Care found that the ransomware attack had cost the NHS an estimated total of £92 million, with the biggest cost being attributed to restoring its services to full operation and to the recovery of data.
With Reuters reporting that a Dublin hospital was forced to cancel all outpatient appointments apart from the most urgent cases, Reed said that “national critical services must ensure they have a well-defined incident response plan, should the worst happen, to ensure a continuation of vital services”.
“As ransomware attacks continue to gather momentum - this being the second in just one week, following the US Colonial Pipeline attack - hospitals and other critical services need to prioritise protecting themselves against these callous attacks, even on limited resources,” he added.
-
Gen Z workers are keen on AI in the workplace – but they’re still skeptical about the hypeNews Younger workers could lead the shift to AI, but only think it can can manage some tasks
-
DORA 6 months on: What’s still left to learn and do?Compliance doesn’t have to be a scramble, and choosing the right vendor can be the difference between success and failure
-
Ransomware victims are getting better at haggling with hackersNews While nearly half of companies paid a ransom to get their data back last year, victims are taking an increasingly hard line with hackers to strike fair deals.
-
LockBit data dump reveals a treasure trove of intel on the notorious hacker groupNews An analysis of May's SQL database dump shows how much LockBit was really making
-
‘I take pleasure in thinking I can rid society of at least some of them’: A cyber vigilante is dumping information on notorious ransomware criminals – and security experts say police will be keeping close tabsNews An anonymous whistleblower has released large amounts of data allegedly linked to the ransomware gangs
-
It's been a bad week for ransomware operatorsNews A host of ransomware strains have been neutralized, servers seized, and key players indicted
-
Everything we know about the Peter Green Chilled cyber attackNews A ransomware attack on the chilled food distributor highlights the supply chain risks within the retail sector
-
Scattered Spider: Who are the alleged hackers behind the M&S cyber attack?News The Scattered Spider group has been highly active in recent years
-
Ransomware attacks are rising — but quiet payouts could mean there's more than actually reported
News Ransomware attacks continue to climb, but they may be even higher than official figures show as companies choose to quietly pay to make such incidents go away.
-
Cleo attack victim list grows as Hertz confirms customer data stolen – and security experts say it won't be the lastNews Hertz has confirmed it suffered a data breach as a result of the Cleo zero-day vulnerability in late 2024, with the car rental giant warning that customer data was stolen.
