Outage shuts down Newfoundland and Labrador causing IT networks
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Canada’s healthcare system appears to be the target of a cyber attack. The Newfoundland LabradorDepartment of Health and Community Services issued a statement yesterday that the agency is experiencing an IT systems outage. Some healthcare-related services are impacted by the outage. However, services affected vary by region.
Many routine office visits scheduled laboratory procedures and even chemotherapy has been rescheduled for some patients. email is also not working.
The Newfoundland and Labrador Centre for Health Information (NLCHI) is working to resolve the issues.
Canada’s Central Health, Eastern Health, Western Health, and the Labrador-Grenfell Regional Health authorities are all impacted by the attack.
The Canadian Department of Health and Community Services has issued a public advisory on which services are available and what has been postponed for each of the affected regions.
“The Department of Health and Community Services continues to assess an IT systems outage that is affecting a number of health-related services. While the outage is affecting IT systems, including Regional Health Authority (RHA) emails, impacts to services vary by region,” says the site.
Today’s non-emergency appointments for Eastern Health and Central Health have been rescheduled.
History of Hacking Canada
In March of last year, Canada’s Rogers Communications suffered a data breach. sensitive customer information was found online in an unsecured database. No payment information was exposed but personal information like address, account number, and email address was all available online for anyone to download.
In 2018, Canadian telecom giant, Bell Canada, announced it had been hacked again. Stolen data involved 100,000 subscriber names and e-mail addresses.
Data leaks like these can lead to other cybercrimes like identity theft. People who have been exposed during a data breach should use a quality identity theft protection service to protect themselves against phishing emails, ransomware attacks, and scam websites.
Montreal’s STM public transport system was hit by RansomExx in October 2020. In December 2020, Vancouver’s Metro operator TransLink was attacked with Egregor ransomware. In that security incident, Russian hackers sensitive exfiltrated customer information says a report by Bleeping Computer.
