Eastern Health facilities in Victoria, Australia, had to cancel planned surgeries after a “cyber incident” happened late Tuesday. In addition, the federal government’s COVID-19 booking system suffers day one “problems.”
Eastern Health is a healthcare conglomerate operating the Angliss, Box Hill, Healesville, and Maroondah hospitals, and many other health facilities throughout the red continent.
Eastern Health took many of its systems offline in response to the incident:
“Many Eastern Health IT systems have been taken off-line as a precaution while we seek to understand and rectify the situation. It is important to note, patient safety has not been compromised.” it said in a tweet on Wednesday.
Later, also on Twitter, the hospital revealed that it was a cyber incident that knocked off its systems, “Eastern Health is still experiencing significant impacts related to the cyber incident.”
Eastern Health said Category 1 Elective Surgery would continue as planned, however, the incident has impacted its ability to undertake less urgent Category 2 and 3 surgeries.
According to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) report attacks on the health sector accounted for 123 of the total 519 notifications in the six months to December 2020.
Almost a year ago, the federal government’s myGov portal was down, too, when it was flooded with website visitors who wanted to sign up for income assistance in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak.
At the time, the minister in charge of government services Stuart Robert said the portal suffered a DDoS attack with part of the outage being caused by legitimate traffic that was past the 55,000 user limit.
But later when speaking in Parliament, Robert said it was only the 95,000 people trying to connect to myGov that had triggered a DDoS alert, and it was not a malicious attack.
