A major hospital network in Toronto said its digital systems went down on Monday and it was working to investigate the cause of the outage.
The University Health Network issued a “gray code” – a hospital code for a system failure – but released few other details about what happened.
“UHN is experiencing outages in our digital systems across our networks,” spokeswoman Gillian Howard said.
Clinical areas currently use “downtime procedures,” she said.
Later Monday night, UHN posted a series of tweets on Howard’s behalf, noting that there may be “difficulties reaching some network departments” as he restores service.
The tweets also warned that patients arriving at its hospitals on Tuesday should expect delays.
“As always, the safety of our patients is our top priority. We will provide an update as things progress,” the tweets concluded.
The UHN outage comes after Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children issued a “code grey” last month when a ransomware attack affected its operations.
Last week, the children’s hospital said 80% of its priority systems had been restored and it had paid no ransom.
LockBit, a ransomware group that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation has called one of the most active and destructive in the world, has apologized for the hack allegedly by one of its partners.
He offered to use a decryptor, but SickKids said he wasn’t using it, with his technology team restoring his systems.
Meanwhile, Scouts Canada recently suffered a cyber attack on its “MyScouts” database which helps run programs across the country. The system remains down, although Scouts Canada said only a small number of users were directly affected.
While it’s unclear what caused the most recent hospital outage at UHN, a research firm says data indicates cyberattacks in Canada increased by 20% last year.
Check Point Research said the healthcare, financial and government sectors were the hardest hit in 2022.
Ontario’s Cybersecurity Expert Panel concluded in a September report that the broader utility sector needs more work to achieve “cyber maturity.”
The panel said that “cybersecurity-related initiatives are happening in parallel across different sectors without a centrally coordinated strategy or model.”
He suggested the province “strengthen existing governance structures to enable effective cybersecurity risk management” across the utility sector.
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