More than two months after a computer attack on a hospital center in southern Ile-de-France, a new hospital has been the victim of a cyberattack.
“The Mignot Hospital in Chen has been the victim of a major cyberattack,” Jean-Noel Barrault, the minister in charge of digital technology, lamented on Twitter on Sunday. Thus, the health institution joins the list of affected French hospitals after Oloron-Saint-Marie, Dax, Villefranche or even Rouen.
Ransomware attack
According to France Info, a computer attack occurred on Saturday evening with the deployment of uninstalled ransomware, one of the last stages of the cybercriminals’ plan before a ransom demand.
However, the minister specified that teams at the Versailles hospital in west Paris managed to isolate “infected systems to limit the spread” of the ransomware before alerting Anssi, a French cyber-firefighter. Having taken up the case, the cyber department of the Paris prosecutor’s office entrusted the investigation to the gendarmes of the center for combating digital crimes.
In addition to the transfer of six patients, the white plan was launched as a preventive measure, these emergency care plans for hospitals, which led, among other things, to the deprogramming of surgeries and a reduction in the admission of new patients. If the service machines are still working, they are disconnected from the network, the computer system is turned off, which obliges the personnel to a different organization of work.
Cyber crisis and healthcare
This hospital center has about 700 beds with a budget of about 300 million euros. The cybercrisis has hit him at a time when the French hospital system is under strain from the unprecedented triple epidemic of bronchiolitis, influenza and Covid-19.
The health situation, described as “completely unprecedented”, also worried French public health on Friday, December 2. And so it risks being complicated by a computer attack in the western part of Paris.
Restoring a healthy IT architecture takes time. For example, in its latest update in mid-October, a hospital center in the south of Ile-de-France said it hoped to restore 80% of the IT solutions it needs to operate by the end of the month, allowing it to withdraw its white plan early November.
The total cost of the crisis for this institution was estimated at 7 million euros: 2 million for crisis management and 5 million for the reconstruction of the IT infrastructure. The government announced for its part at the beginning of the school year that it will allocate 20 million euros to help hospitals better protect themselves.