Brussel’s CHU university hospital suffered a cyberattack

In Brussels, a university hospital, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire (CHU), has become the latest addition to the increasing number of European hospitals subject to cyberattacks.

Based on reports, the admins of the affected entity diverted the route of Ambulances away from CHU university hospital earlier this week because of the cybersecurity incident. Unfortunately, authorities and the cybersecurity teams have yet to announce the details of the attack.

According to the CHU chief executive, their healthcare institution has an emergency plan for these situations after knowing about the attack against another hospital in Belgium. Moreover, the hospital disconnected its servers and rebooted the next day while its personnel began working pen-and-paper. The servers stayed disconnected from the internet.

The chief executive also clarified that they expected to continue their work despite the attack since they had already applied their emergency plan against a malicious campaign.

 

CHU university hospital recovered immediately after the attack but experienced disruptions for several hours.

 

CHU announced that their IT application was accessible again, and their system recovered last Saturday. However, they still experienced disruptions to avoid burdening the hospital’s recovery process.

The healthcare company is still investigating, and its website has been unavailable. Fortunately, the investigation has not discovered a data leak or medical data theft. However, the company warned their staff that they should remain cautious.

This newly discovered cyberattack followed another CHU university hospital threat campaign in France earlier this month. The company announced the following day that the university hospital did not have a data leak incident and that an emergency service continued to provide aid to impacted sectors.

The CHU in France also disconnected its Information Technology system from the internet. Therefore, patients that needed new appointments could not make transactions due to the emergency interruption.

These growing cybercriminal operations by threat actors against European healthcare institutions pose a considerable threat to unprepared hospitals. These campaigns could inflict massive damage not just to money but also to human lives.

European hospitals should have an established cybersecurity protocol to mitigate the damages caused by a threat attack.