Cancer treatment services across the United States have taken a big hit as a cyber attack is said to have disrupted the software services operating in the High-tech radiation machines used to treat the malign disease.
Elekta is the company in discussion that was hit by a cyber attack and as it supplies software meant to operate radiation treatment systems, most of the medical treatments were cancelled or postponed across North America.
Georgia-based Emory Healthcare and Yale New Haven Health System were the two medical facilities that were deeply hit by a cyber attack.
Maria McLennan who lives in Georgia stated that her treatment was halted at the St Joseph Hospital as the radiation therapy unit witnessed a downtime. Thus, she was asked to visit other hospitals in the Emory network based on the current health stats.
Janet Christenbury, the spokesperson of Emory Healthcare said that her company has taken the incident seriously and is taking all necessary measures to avoid such incidents in the future.
Ms. Janet added that her company has taken data privacy on a serious note by appointing a third party forensic expert to find out the vulnerabilities in its current Cybersecurity posture.
The breach is said to have impacted other hospitals in the network and those include Lifespan Cancer Institute in Rhode Island, Rhode Island Hospital, and Southcoast Health in Massachusetts.
Note– From Tuesday this week, Elekta has migrated its customers to Microsoft Azure Cloud as its cloud based services were impacted deeply because of a suspected malware since April 22nd, 2021.
