One Hospital Faces Rebuild After Brutal Cyberattack

Countless businesses were hit hard by the recent Petya ransomware attack, but few as hard as Princeton, West Virginia-based Princeton Community Hospital. After struggling with the aftermath of the Petya attack, the hospital had to rebuild its entire network and reinstall its core systems.

The Petya assault, which hit in late June, pounded large firms across the globe, including Nuance, Merck, advertiser WPP, Danish shipping and transport firm Maersk and legal firm DLA Piper.  The list of Petya victims also includes PCH, a 267-bed facility based in the southern part of the state.

After the attack, IT staffers first concluded that the hospital had emerged from the attack relatively unscathed. Hospital leaders noted that they are continuing to provide all inpatient care and services, as well as all other patient care services such as surgeries, therapeutics, diagnostics, lab and radiology, but was experiencing some delays in processing radiology information for non-emergent patients. Also, for a while the hospital diverted all non-emergency ambulance visits away from its emergency department.

However, within a few days executives found that its IT troubles weren’t over. “Our data appears secure, intact, and not hacked into; yet we are unable to access the data from the old devices in the network,” said the hospital in a post on Facebook.

To recover from the Petya attack, PCH decided that it had to install 53 new computers throughout the hospital offering clean access to its Meditech EMR system, as well as installing new hard drives on all devices throughout the system and building out an entirely new network.

When you consider how much time its IT staff must’ve logged bringing basic systems online, rebuilding computers and network infrastructure, it seems clear that the hospital took a major financial blow when Petya hit.

Not only that, I have little doubt that PCH faces doubts in the community about its security.  Few patients understand much, if anything, about cyberattacks, but they do want to feel that their hospital has things under control. Having to admit that your network has been compromised isn’t good for business, even if much bigger companies in and outside the healthcare business were brought to the knees by the same attack. It may not be fair, but that’s the way it is.

That being said, PCH seems to have done a good job keeping the community it serves aware what was going on after the Petya dust settled. It also made the almost certainly painful decision to rebuild key IT assets relatively quickly, which might not have been feasible for a bigger organization.

All told, it seems that PCH survived Petya successfully as any other business might have, and better than some. Let’s hope the pace of global cyberattacks doesn’t speed up further. While PCH might have rebounded successfully after Petya, there’s only so much any hospital can take.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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