Hospital Sisters Health System and Prevea Health report system outage, possible cyberattack
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Hospital Sisters Health System (HSHS) and Prevea Health reported a significant "temporary system outage", raising concerns of a cyber attack.
HSHS operates as a multi-institutional healthcare system headquartered in Springfield, Illinois. Prevea Health is a healthcare organization located in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Prevea Health is partnered with HSHS, of which it owns a 50% stake.
HSHS hospitals and Prevea Health are currently addressing the system outage. The ongoing situation has disrupted patients' reliable access to both companies' phone systems and medical applications like MyChart and MyPrevea.
Neither Prevea Health nor Hospital Sisters have explicitly attributed the system outage to a cyberattack. However, given the limited information available, the possibility of a cyberattack has not been ruled out. Software experts suggest that the ongoing systemwide outage is likely a result of a cybersecurity attack - as it encompasses the entire computer systems of multiple insitutions, includes clinical and administrative applications, phone systems, and internet services and lasts for more than 2 days at the moment.
HSHS officials have not yet provided a resolution or a clear reason for the ongoing outage. This situation has also affected HSHS Medical Group, Prairie Cardiovascular clinics, and Prevea Health, the latter of which collaborates with six HSHS hospitals in Wisconsin.
HSHS has established a dedicated webpage to provide updates, but no timeline for resolving the issues has been communicated.
During the outage of technical systems, HSHS Medical Group advised patients to maintain their in-person appointments as scheduled.
Update - Scammers are already trying to take advantage of a system-wide outage of the HSHS hospital system. There are reports that patients are receiving emails, texts, and phone calls from persons claiming to be HSHS representatives demanding payments. The medical group's online and electronic medical records are offline and HSHS said that no payments are being collected at this time.
On 31st October Hospital Sisters Health System it begun reviewing the data that's potentially impacted by the incident
