COVID-19 Testing Center Hit By Cyberattack

While the Coronavirus (COVID-19) is spreading on a global scale, hackers are launching Coronavirus-themed attacks against targets worldwide. Computer systems at the University Hospital Brno in the Czech Republic have been shut down on Friday due to a cyberattack that struck in the wee hours of the day.

The University Hospital Brno hosts one of the 18 laboratories the Czech Republic uses for testing for the new coronavirus. Since the outbreak, the institution did up to 20 tests a day. The hospital was forced to shut down the IT network, the attack also hit two other of the hospital’s branches, the Children’s Hospital and the Maternity Hospital.

“The information on cyber attack was confirmed by Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, who was informed by Jaroslav Šmíd, who now manages the National Office for Cyber ​​and Information Security.” reported the Idnes website. “We are dealing with it, we are trying to secure the operation of the hospital,” said the hospital’s director Jaroslav Štěrba.

Experts from the Czech National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), Czech police (NCOZ) and hospital’s IT staff are now working to recover operations at the hospital.

“There are laboratories, hematology, microbiology, biochemistry and more sophisticated laboratories for tumor diagnostics, radiological systems work, but there is no possibility of transferring information from these laboratories to the database system,” Štěrba explained. “We are able to investigate patients, but we are not yet able to store data. Patient care is maintained and we are working to be able to store data in hours, ”

It is not clear if testing capability at the hospital was impacted by the cyber-attack.

Reference:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/covid-19-testing-center-hit-by-cyberattack/