Cyberattack Forces Texas Hospital to Turn Away Ambulances

A cyberattack against the University Medical Center on Friday forced the Lubbock, Texas, hospital to severely limit operations, The Register has reported, including turning away ambulances after its computer systems were infected with malware.

Although most emergency care facilities have returned to operating, the hospital released a statement on Monday that "out of an abundance of caution, we will continue to temporarily divert incoming emergency and non-emergency patients via ambulance to nearby health facilities until this issue is resolved."

The statement added that "we are making accommodations wherever possible to minimize any disruption to our patients and our critical services. Our investigation into this incident remains ongoing and will take time to complete."

The level-one trauma hospital is the only such facility within nearly 400 miles and any disruption to its service could be life threatening for those in need of urgent medical attention, according to The Register.

The hospital said it became aware of unusual activity on one of its IT networks, disconnected it from the main computer system, and called for help in order to fix the situation.

"While we've seen the rate of ransomware attacks reach a kind of 'homeostasis' or even a decline across industries, attacks against healthcare organizations continue to intensify both in number and scope," Sophos security software and hardware company's field CTO John Shier said.

He explained that "the highly sensitive nature of healthcare information and need for accessibility will always place a bullseye on the healthcare industry from cybercriminals. Unfortunately, cybercriminals have learned that few healthcare organizations are prepared to respond to these attacks, demonstrated by increasingly longer recovery times. These attacks can have immense ripple effects."

Earlier this year, a ransomware attack on a subsidiary of UnitedHealth resulted in the private healthcare data of millions of Americans being leaked to hostile groups, Breitbart reported.

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