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.
-
The top ransomware trends in 2025In-depth A splintering of top groups and changing attitudes toward payments are changing attacker tactics at speed
-
Should workers prepare to become AI agent bosses?In-depth Tech leaders claim employees could soon be managing AI agents – but this will require a huge culture shift, security awareness and governance
-
Cyber professionals are losing sleep over late night attacksNews Hackers are biding their time and launching attacks when businesses can’t respond
-
Prolific ransomware operator added to Europe’s Most Wanted list as US dangles $10 million rewardNews The US Department of Justice is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the arrest of Volodymyr Viktorovych Tymoshchuk, an alleged ransomware criminal.
-
Jaguar Land Rover “did the right thing” shutting down systems to thwart cyber attackNews The attack on Jaguar Land Rover highlights the growing attractiveness of the automotive sector
-
Ransomware attack on IT supplier disrupts hundreds of Swedish municipalitiesNews The attack on IT systems supplier Miljödata has impacted public sector services across the country
-
A notorious hacker group is ramping up cloud-based ransomware attacksNews The Storm-0501 threat group is refining its tactics, according to Microsoft, shifting away from traditional endpoint-based attacks and toward cloud-based ransomware.
-
Security researchers have just identified what could be the first ‘AI-powered’ ransomware strain – and it uses OpenAI’s gpt-oss-20b modelNews Using OpenAI's gpt-oss:20b model, ‘PromptLock’ generates malicious Lua scripts via the Ollama API.
-
Data I/O shuts down systems in wake of ransomware attack
News Regulatory filings by Data I/O suggest the costs of dealing with the attack could be significant
-
Average ransom payment doubles in a single quarterNews Targeted social engineering and data exfiltration have become the biggest tactics as three major ransomware groups dominate
