National flag of Ireland flies above the President’s residence in Dublin, August 25, 2018. REUTERS/Dylan Martinez – RC12C3B40540
DUBLIN — Ireland’s health service operator shut down all its IT systems on Friday to protect them from a “significant” ransomware attack, crippling diagnostic services, disrupting COVID-19 testing and forcing hospitals to cancel many appointments.
Ireland’s COVID-19 vaccination program was not disrupted as it is on a different system, but the attack was affecting IT systems serving all other local and national health provision, the head of the Health Service Executive (HSE) said.
The HSE shut down the IT systems as a precaution to protect as much information as possible and was assessing how the attack would affect other services, Chief Executive Paul Reid said.
Reid said the cyber attack, discovered in the early hours of Friday morning, was a “human-operated ransomware attack where they would seek to get access to data and seek a ransom for it”.
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The HSE had not received a ransom demand “at this stage” and was at a very early point in understanding the threat posed by what Reid described as a “very sophisticated attack”.
“This is having a severe impact on our health and social care services today. Individual services and hospital groups are impacted in different ways,” Health Minister Stephen Donnelly said on Twitter.
