State health lab service confirms cyberattack

The National Health Laboratory Service (NHLS) has confirmed a cyberattack that compromised its systems and infrastructure.

The incident occurred on Saturday morning, but the NHLS says all patient data is safe.

“Preliminary investigation suggests that our Enterprise Resource Planning (Oracle) environment and Laboratory Information System (LIS) (TrakCare) database and our CDW are not affected, therefore no patient data has been lost or compromised,” the NHLS said.

“The investigation indicated that a ransomware virus was utilised to target selected points in the NHLS IT systems, rendering them inaccessible and blocking communication from the LIS and other databases to and from users.

“As such all our systems remain inaccessible both internally and externally including to and from healthcare facilities until the integrity of the environment is secured and repaired. All users will be aware that the NHLS networked laboratory system is heavily reliant on these information technology systems that have been disrupted.”

According to the NHLS, it has established that sections of their system have been deleted including in a backup server and this will require rebuilding the affected parts.

“Unfortunately, this will take time and investigations thus far have not advanced enough for us to give a timeframe toward the restoration of our systems and full service,” the NHLS said.

As the cyberattacks continued the NHLS was able to block these because of an additional layer of security that was built to prevent further damage.

“We also have had to shutdown systems to enable us to repair the damage.”

The NHLS Incident Response Team includes both internal experts and external cybersecurity professionals.

“Currently all our laboratories are fully functional, receiving and processing clinical samples. Under normal circumstances, the laboratory reports are automatically generated and sent to clinicians or made available on Web View, this incident has disabled that functionality. However, all urgent results are communicated telephonically to requesting clinicians.”

Cape Times

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