On Sunday, the Hancock Health computer system experienced a threat in the form of a malicious file that was inadvertently placed on the network following an Internet search for health care information by an employee. Fortunately, this threat was quickly identified and was neutralized by Monday morning, thwarting the sequence of events desired by the attacker. While we have been in control of our network the entire time, in an abundance of caution our electronic medical record system, which is hosted in the cloud, was disconnected from the hospital computer network while we addressed the issue. This led to the need to postpone some elective medical care in our hospital and physician practices. We are pleased to say the electronic medical record was once again available by Monday evening and we were back to business as usual by Tuesday morning.
Unlike the purposeful attack on our system five years ago, the current random attack did not result in encryption of our network and no ransom was requested. Similar to our experience five years ago, there was no breach of private health information. We are proud of the information services personnel and our forensic IT partners for their quick work in addressing this situation and for our amazing clinical and support teams for taking exceptional care of our patients during the short period of downtime we experienced.
