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reThe computer failure of the Düsseldorf University Clinic is based, according to the state government, on an attack by hackers with blackmail. Science Minister Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen (independent) said in state parliament on Thursday that the perpetrators had withdrawn the blackmail after contacting police. The prosecution is also now investigating that a patient had to be diverted to a hospital in Wuppertal and died.
According to a report from the Minister of Justice, 30 clinic servers were encrypted last week. A blackmail letter was left on a server, but it was addressed to the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. In the letter, the blackmailers asked to be contacted; According to the report, they did not mention a specific amount.
The perpetrators withdrew from the blackmail
Düsseldorf police contacted and informed the perpetrators that their hacker attack affected a hospital, and not the university. This puts patients at considerable risk. The perpetrators then dropped the extortion and provided a digital key with which the data can be decrypted again.
According to the report, the researchers therefore suspect that the university clinic was affected by chance. Meanwhile, the perpetrators are no longer available.
The stranger is now also being investigated for the death of a woman, as a life-threatening patient who was to be taken to the university clinic on the night of September 11-12 was referred to a hospital in Wuppertal. Your treatment could only be one hour late. He died a short time later, the justice minister said in his report.
No stolen data
According to current knowledge, no data was stolen or irretrievably erased during the hackers’ attack. The clinic announced that studies by IT experts had shown this.
Hackers exploited a vulnerability in an application. “The security breach was in a common and worldwide commercial add-on software. Until the software company finally closed this gap, there was a sufficient window of time to penetrate the systems, ”the clinic said. The attackers would have ensured that systems gradually failed and that access to stored data was no longer possible.
Düsseldorf University Hospital now hopes that it will be some time before patients can return to normal treatment. “Due to the size of the IT system and the abundance of data, we cannot yet estimate when this process will be completed,” Chief Commercial Officer Ekkehard Zimmer said Thursday. “However, we are confident that we will be able to better estimate the time span in the next few days and that we will be there for our patients again step by step.”
Last Thursday the computer system of the university hospital failed. Ambulances were no longer heading to the large facilities in the state capital of North Rhine-Westphalia, operations were postponed, and planned treatment appointments were canceled.
