Pierluigi Paganini February 04, 2024

A cyber attack forced Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago to take IT systems offline with a severe impact on its operations.

The Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago took IT systems offline after a cyberattack. The security incident severely impacted normal operations also causing the delay of medical care.

Lurie Children’s Hospital is one of the top pediatric hospitals in the United States. Formerly known as Children’s Memorial Hospital, it was renamed in recognition of Ann and Robert H. Lurie, who made a significant donation to the hospital.

Lurie Children’s Hospital offers a wide range of specialized medical services, including pediatric surgery, oncology, cardiology, neurology, and neonatology.

In addition to its clinical services, Lurie Children’s Hospital is actively involved in pediatric research, striving to advance medical knowledge and develop innovative treatments for childhood diseases and disorders.

Lurie Children’s is a Chicago-based pediatric acute care hospital with 360 beds, it is located on the university’s Streeterville campus with more than 1,665 physicians on its medical staff and 4,000 employees.

The hospital announced this week that it promptly started the incident response procedure. The healthcare organization notified law enforcement agencies and is working with leading experts to investigate the incident.

“Lurie Children’s is actively responding to a cybersecurity matter. We are taking this very seriously, are investigating with the support of leading experts, and are working in collaboration with law enforcement agencies. As part of our response to this matter, we have taken network systems offline.” states a first update provided by the hospital. “We recognize the concern and inconvenience the systems outage may cause our patient families and community providers, and are working diligently to resolve this matter as quickly and effectively as possible.”

Lurie confirmed that the attack disrupted the hospital’s access to the internet, email, phone services, and the MyChat platform.

“The incident has impacted phones, emails, internet service, some elective surgeries and procedures even had to be canceled.” reported the website Abc7chicago.

A dedicated helpline has been set up to address various requirements, such as handling non-urgent patient inquiries, addressing care-related questions, providing details about scheduled patient appointments, and processing requests for prescription refills.

At this time, no ransomware group has claimed responsibility for the cyber attack on Lurie Children’s Hospital.

Cyber attacks against hospitals are very dangerous, and despite major ransomware gangs imposing restrictions on their affiliates to avoid targeting them, many incidents have recently made headlines.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Lurie Hospital)