Not even the pandemic of Coronavirus stop the activity of the cybercriminalsunfortunately, it reinforces them because times of crisis for some represent "opportunities". Bad to say, but it is so. At a time when the hospitals halfway around the world find themselves in difficulty in fighting COVID-19 infections and research centers are busy finding valid treatments and carrying out tests, what happened at University Hospital Brno is stunned.
The hospital's IT systems, the second largest in the Czech Republic, have been knocked out on Friday due to a cyber attack that hit them in the early hours of the day (there are those who talk about 2 am, others 5 am). The University Hospital Brno hosts one of the 18 laboratories in the Czech Republic dedicated to testing the new Coronavirus, engaged in these days in carrying out 20 tests a day to check for positivity. A very important job, especially in the Eastern European country which is among the most affected, although it is – fortunately – far from the Italian numbers.
At the moment, not much information is disseminated about cyberattack, but the center's site still appears offside. A ransomware attack to ask for a ransom? It cannot be excluded. The net effect however seems to be another, as reported by BleepingComputer: due to the attack, the test results of the previous two days, about a dozen, would have suffered a delay on the times.
According to the director of the hospital Jaroslav Štěrba, who spoke to the Czech News Agency (ČTK), the computers began to "fall gradually" and therefore the infrastructure had to be shut down. Some patients were diverted to St. Anne's University Hospital and two other wings of the hospital, Children's Hospital and Maternity Hospital, were also affected by the attack.
The systems available to laboratories such as hematology, microbiology, biochemistry, tumor diagnostics or radiology seem to operate on a different network than the one affected and therefore continue to operate at full capacity. The problem is that medical data collected by laboratory devices cannot be recorded in databases, forcing operators to pass information by hand, lengthening times at a time when every minute is essential.
The National Cyber and Information Security Agency (NÚKIB) is working to identify the problem and remedy the situation. The National Organized Crime Center is also at work, committed to identifying who carried out the attack. Unfortunately, it is not the first time that attacks like these affect centers and hospitals, and it will not be the last. Improving hospitals in the future will mean not only equipping them with everything they need, including technology, but also increasing the security level of the IT infrastructure to avoid external intrusions.
