Joe STENSON Fri, 4, 2021, 10:36 AM·3 min read Ireland's health authority said Friday it had shut dow14 May 2021 17:59
Joe STENSON
Fri, May 14, 2021, 10:36 AM·3 min read
Ireland's health authority said Friday it had shut down its computer systems after experiencing a "significant ransomware attack", a week after the largest US fuel pipeline network was also targeted.
The Irish attack was blamed on international criminals and was said to be targeting healthcare records, but officials said patient safety was not at risk.
"We have taken the precaution of shutting down all our IT systems in order to protect them from this attack and to allow us (to) fully assess the situation with our own security partners," the Health Service Executive (HSE) said.
"We apologise for inconvenience caused to patients and to the public and will give further information as it becomes available," it added, stressing Ireland's coronavirus vaccination programme was unaffected and "going ahead as planned".
Ireland's ambulance service is also "operating as per normal with no impact on emergency ambulance call handling and dispatch nationally", the HSE added.
And Irish premier Micheal Martin was pressing ahead with a visit Friday to Britain to meet Prime Minister Boris Johnson amid tensions over Brexit, aides said.
Liz Canavan, a top official in Martin's office, said the outage was also affecting child protection services, which are hosted on HSE servers.
But at a televised Covid-19 briefing, she stressed: "Emergency departments are operating as normal and if you need to attend a hospital, please do so."
Another ransomware attack last Friday forced the shutdown of the United States' largest fuel distribution system, leading to some panic buying at gasoline stations along the east coast.
Moscow has rejected US accusations that a Russia-based group was behind the cyberattack.
Ransomware attacks use a type of malware that encrypts files on an infected computer, normally via an email attachment or download, and demands money to unlock them.
HSE chief executive Paul Reid said the attack in Ireland was "an internationally operated criminal operation", and the authority was working with police, the army and its major IT security providers.
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