Hospitals in Dax and Villefranche have been targeted by cyber attacks that crippled computers and telephony. Only the emergency switchboard continued to function. “Hospitals must be among the targets that are protected at the first level”, affirms Tuesday February 16 on franceinfo Frédéric Valletoux, president of the Hospital Federation of France.
franceinfo: Do you have any information on the origin of these attacks?
Frédéric Valletoux: No, these are attacks whose origin we do not know. Sometimes they are matched, this is the case in Dax, with a ransom note to unlock systems. This is far from the first time that hospitals or other institutions have been attacked in this way. But for 18 months, it has accelerated with the epidemic, we see that there is a multiplication of this type of attack against hospitals.
Why hospitals?
We must consider that they are easy prey, that they have their heads elsewhere, that they are mobilized by the epidemic, the care of patients, by an overflowing activity and that perhaps the attention is diminishing when it comes to the precautions to be taken in terms of computer security. There had been a spectacular one at the end of 2019 at the Rouen University Hospital.
What are the people who launch these attacks looking for?
It is amounts in tens of thousands of euros, sometimes in hundreds of thousands of euros that are requested, but it is above all disruption for hospitals in a very clear way. We should look at attack by attack how far we block files. What we are seeing this year is an increase in malicious cyber attacks or ransom demands.
What are the consequences for the hospital?
Today everything is digitized, the exchange of information from one service to another is digitized, examinations go through IT. So stopping the servers leads to paralysis, to difficulty in taking charge, to deprogramming, sometimes to transfers of patients to nearby hospitals because there are things that you can no longer do. We are at a time when recourse to technology, to digital technology, is also used in surgery, in the monitoring of patients, analyzes and the acts themselves. There, it is the medical systems which are blocked. In Dax, it’s been a week since it happened and the hospital is still not out of this attack.
How to get out of it?
The solution is to be vigilant, to better protect yourself, to develop the most efficient systems. But we know that in this game, it is the game of the cat and the mouse. We protect ourselves and then the hackers, from abroad most of the time, we are one step ahead. There are national recommendations that are given by the National Agency for Computer Systems Security. Hospitals must be among the targets that are protected at the first level, this is a request that has already been made to the government for a while. They must require additional protection and additional support.
A circular from the Ministry of Health asks hospitals to re-mobilize by Thursday in anticipation of a new wave of the epidemic. What do you think ?
As if the hospitals had let their guard down for a year, as if they had demobilized with 26,000 patients who have complicated Covid. No, the hospital remains mobilized, it has not lowered its level of attention at all for almost a year now. This circular undoubtedly anticipates the impact of variants on hospital pressure which are increasingly present in our territory. We know that they will automatically send more people to the hospital because they will reach more French people. We expect to have an influx of patients in the coming weeks.
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