Another mega cyber attack on hospitals - Ascension
Well, I suppose I better get ready for the next round of required password changes, must be at least 10 characters long, use caps/numbers/symbols, can’t copy the previous 100 passwords, and have to change every 2 months. Whee.
No word on who might have done this, but it is very concerning for another ransomware attack. These are likely going to get increasingly frequent as there is more and more dependence on EHRs for everything in a hospital. Change Healthcare got hit earlier this year. Other hospital systems have been hit before, but this is almost 150 hospitals in 20 states. I think hospitals are going to be investing much more heavily in cyber security going forward!
Also, it’s crazy that the federal government required EHR usage for hospitals but is not involved in the security side.
Now would be the perfect time to open a healthcare cybersecurity firm/consulting business and land some massive contracts.
Working a contract at an Ascension facility. Utter shit show. Downtime procedures not taught to literally anyone.
Glad I work in a shithole hospital with no money to post ransom.
And here’s me over here still trying to figure out what “downtime procedures” are …
My hospital was hit by a cyber attack in fall 2020. We had no epic for a month. So scary and stressful, there were definitely ramifications to many patients outcomes.
Is this just gonna be a monthly thing from now on? It’s fine if it is I just want to know so I can mentally prepare myself when patients scream at me when our already broken healthcare system gets even worse.
Can’t even get medication refilled right now. I have one that goes through ascension rx specialty pharmacy; can’t really get it filled anywhere else without going through a painful series of authorizations and approvals (that’s also unlikely to be attainable right now as my doc is also ascension; and my insurance which is via ascension smart health, mandates that it’s filled through ascension rx).
We need world wide effort to thwart cyber crime and terrorism with the most strict punishment. Every country needs to come together on this.
Why is this not in the news more? For Ascension Seton at least this cyber security issue is worse than it sounds. My wife hasn’t been able to assist patients for a few days and the cyber issue is their systems have all been locked in a ransomware attack. It is also United Health and other hospitals in the US and England, that we know of.
This could be very bad with the possible loss of healthcare records and history for millions. It could also lead to our healthcaee industry being overwhelmed even more so than now.
Let me tell you what I am a nurse in the emergency room at a Illinois Ascension hospital and it is a freaking disaster we are doing three times the work it’s taking double the time not to mention critical patients that need to wait two to three times as long to get stat results for brain bleeds or blood clots. It is so unsafe the staff is just so busy and overworked and exhausted from patients being rude to them. So many documents are going to go missing everything is so disorganized it’s unbelievable the amount of records that will go missing during this time is unbelievable. I was looking to change positions anyway due to a denial of a raise and and now I’m going to work four times as hard give crappy patient care and receive the same…no thanks
(I have been commenting this pretty much everywhere people are discussing the ascension hack because I need help.)
I’m freaking out because all of my prescriptions are filled through ascension pharmacy and I have no idea what to do now. I go out of state across the country on 5/13 until 5/23 and without my meds I am completely bedridden. Does anyone have any advice or suggestions on how I can get my prescriptions filled elsewhere? I really don’t know what to do and I leave in 3 days.
Work at an ascension in Michigan on a travel contract. I will be having nightmares surrounding paper for a while… it’s an absolute shit show. One plus? Doctors are actually having to come to bedside long enough to hand write a note.
I’ve worked on these situations and the only thing that saves you is a system that is hardened against allowing any macro office file to get there and open in the first place. The fact Microsoft has not figured out a way to prevent this all together at this point in time is seeming criminal at a certain point.
I wish I would have known this before I found a new doctor that’s with Ascension. I haven’t been able to make any of my routine appointments for quite some time. They have no answers and don’t know when. It’s like what the hell did y’all do before computers. They are completely stuck and can’t operate
This is annoying, we get so many patients from ascension because ascension is not a healthcare provider, they are an insurance bleeder. They keep people alive to bleed their insurance. The regularity and manner in which ascension fucks up would be considered a war crime if it were perpetrated by a government.
Don’t forget the fake phishing emails from IT!
We are up to 16 characters now. And it needs to be changed every 6 months. So of course I add an incremental digit as a 17th character. And we still got hacked after that. Apparently an employee fell for a password change scam. So now when we need a password change we have to answer a gauntlet of 7 questions correctly.