CommonSpirit hospital chains hit by ransomware, patients are facing problems

CommonSpirit, one of the largest hospital chains in the US, suffered a ransomware cyberattack that impacted its operations.

Common Spirit, one of the largest hospital chains in the US, this week suffered a ransomware cyberattack that caused severe inconvenience to the facilities and to patients

The alleged security breach led to delayed surgeries, hold-ups in patient care and forced the chain to reschedule doctor appointments across the country.

“CommonSpirit Health has identified an IT security issue that is impacting some of our facilities. We have taken certain systems offline. We are continuing to investigate this issue and follow existing protocols for system outages.” reads the statement published by the company.

CommonSpirit Health confirmed it had experienced an IT security issue that forced it to take part of its infrastructure offline.

“We are grateful to our staff and physicians, who are doing everything possible to minimize the impact to our patients.” continues the statement.“We take our responsibility to our patients very seriously and apologize for any inconvenience.”

NBC News, citing a person familiar with its remediation efforts, revealed that the organization suffered a ransomware attack.

“While CommonSpirit declined to share specifics, a person familiar with its remediation efforts confirmed to NBC News that it had sustained a ransomware attack.” reported NBC News.

NBC News added that multiple facilities have been impacted the ransomware attacks. The media reported that CHI Memorial Hospital (Tennessee), some St. Luke’s hospitals (Texas), and Virginia Mason Franciscan Health (Seattle) were impacted.

CommonSpirit did not share details about the problems its hospitals are facing across the country.

At this time, none of the ransomware gangs claimed responsibility for the attack. It is unclear if the threat actors have stolen data from the infrastructure of the hotel chain.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, CommonSpirit)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.