A man in Germany in need of emergency care has been forced to go to a more remote hospital due to a attacks ransomware.
On September 10, the University Hospital of Düsseldorf (UKD) in Germany was attacked by ransomware as the attackers took advantage of the vulnerability Citrix ADC CVE-2019-19781 .
By vacation of their IT systems, the hospital announced that planned and external treatments as well as emergency care cannot be performed. Those seeking emergency care were forced to move to more distant hospitals.
The hospital turned to police and according to German media, the police contacted the ransomware operators via the instructions of the ransom note and informed them that the target was a hospital. As can be seen from the ransom note that was on the encrypted ones diskof the hospital, the ransomware was directed at Heinrich Heine University, not the hospital itself.
Since the police contacted the blackmailers and explained that they had encrypted a hospital, the ransomware operators withdrew the ransom demand and handed over a decryption key.
The hospital resumed its systems once it received the key, and investigations concluded that the data was most likely not stolen.
But until all this was done, a patient who rushed to the Dusseldorf hospital and needed immediate treatment was transferred to the most distant hospital, about 32 kilometers away, in Wuppertal, after the University Hospital Dusseldorf was unable to register emergency services. need.
This transfer delayed care for an hour, resulting in the patient losing his life. Following the death of the patient, the German prosecutor's office launched an investigation into whether this attack was responsible and whether there was homicide due to negligence.
