Ransomware attack forced hospitals to divert away ambulances
UMC had to divert all emergency and non-emergency cases
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A major American public healthcare provider was forced it to divert patients to other facilities after suffering aransomwareattack.
UMC Health System, or University Medical Center Health System, is a comprehensive public healthcare provider based in Lubbock, Texas. It serves as a teaching hospital for Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and provides a wide range of healthcare services, including inpatient, outpatient, emergency, and specialized care.
Its website is currently offline, butBleepingComputernoted while it was still available, it displayed an announcement that the organization fell prey to a ransomware attack.
No word from the attackers
“UMC Health System recently detected unusual activity within our IT systems. Immediately after detecting this activity, our teams launched an investigation and took steps to proactively disconnect our systems to contain the incident. Through the ongoing investigation, we determined that the unusual activity was connected to a ransomware incident,” the company was cited as saying.
Ransomware attacks are an unfortunately common occurence, but they are particularly painful when targeting healthcare organizations, and even more so when those organizations are forced to scramble to keep their services going.
In this case, UMC kept its facilities open, but all emergency and non-emergency cases are being diverted elsewhere, the publication said. It’s not known how many people are affected by this change, but we do know that UMC is the only Level 1 trauma center within hundreds of miles, and Lubbock alone has more than 200,000 citizens.
Furthermore, ransomware attacks are usually followed up with data theft, which could result in an even greater number of people affected. So far, no groups have taken responsibility for the attack, and UMC did not share any details, since its investigation into the matter is still ongoing. Therefore, we don’t know who is behind the attack at this time.
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Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.
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