Cyberattack Takes Lurie Children’s Hospital’s Network Offline

As a general rule of thumb, hackers—particularly those that engage in large scale cyberattacks—don’t have much of a moral compass. They’ll attack any business, large or small, if it means they’ll make some money in the process. However, it’s still shocking to see how low some can go, such as the cyberattack on Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago.

The children’s hospital was forced to take its systems offline Wednesday following the attack. The hospital didn’t admit this was the reason at first; rather, it simply said there was a network outage. However, the following day, it revealed the cause was a “cybersecurity matter.” This, of course, interrupted the hospital’s ability to complete their day-to-day business, but worse of all, it delayed medical care as well. The hospital treats more than 200,000 children each year, which makes it essential that the hospital continue to run at all times.

Unfortunately, Lurie Children’s Hospital was forced to take its network offline in an effort to prevent the cyberattack from spreading any further than it already had.

“We are taking this very seriously, investigating with the support of leading experts, and are working in collaboration with law enforcement agencies … As Illinois’ leading provider for pediatric care, our overarching priority is to continue providing safe, quality care to our patients and the communities we serve. Lurie Children’s is open and providing care to patients with as limited disruption as possible.”

Lurie Children’s Hospital

As of this writing, we don’t know what type of cyberattack this is. That means it could be a ransomware attack, demanding the hospital pay attackers to release part of the network and/or its data.

Unfortunately, Lurie isn’t the only hospital to be recently targeted in a cyberattack. Capital Health hospital network and Saint Anthony Hospital in the U.S. and the Katholische Hospitalvereinigung Ostwestfalen (KHO) hospitals in Germany were also attacked. Those attacks were done by Lockbit, an infamous ransomware gang.

Delay in medical care

For some, the delay was not too dramatic: The Associated Press reports that one infusion appointment ran just about 30 minutes longer than it usually would, with medical staff keeping records on paper and relying on text messaging for further communications.

However, at least one surgery was delayed because of the network outage: heart surgery for a seven month old, which was planned since birth.