What Happens During a Cyber Attack on a Hospital?

I was working the night shift at the hospital one evening. It was a typical night. Everyone was busy, patients were calling, meds needed to be passed, and I still had to round and chart on several patients. Then, without warning, everything changed.

Around 9 or 10 pm, our computer system (electronic health record) went down. It’s not uncommon for our charting system to go down. It’s frustrating, but we manage. The electronic health record has everything we need to know about our patients on it. Our computers have patient’s orders, medications and doses, allergies, doctors, and anything else related to their health records.

The hospital has a protocol for when the primary system goes down. There is another continuously backed up system we can read the orders from. We can’t chart anything, but we can view what we have done and what needs to be done. Then, we will all have to play catch up and chart everything when the regular system comes back up. There was a problem though, this system was also down.

That left one more system. It’s a computer that’s hidden from view and backs up once every 24 hours. Well, you guessed it! Even that one was having problems.

We worked for an hour trying to get the backups running and finding different solutions for passing meds that were due. Then, we started trying to get extra help from tech support. We picked up the phone and… nothing! The phone lines were dead too. We could call the operator, but she couldn’t transfer us to anyone outside the building.

Things went from not great to bad around eleven. All the systems in the building went haywire. The fire alarm started going off, then went on and off intermittently for hours. Electromagnets in the doors released and closed, and electronic ID doors weren’t working properly. To top it all off, the HVAC system got in on the action too.

Our hospital, normally a cool 68 to low 70s, skyrocketed to the upper 80s! The rapid change in temperature caused condensation to form on everything. Floors became ice skating rinks, and it was difficult to get to patients’ rooms without falling on slick floors. The ICU was worse. The temperatures there reached over 100 degrees, while the HVAC continued to run at full speed!

Eventually, systems came back online and returned to normal. The temperature went back to normal, but the condensation remained for a while. A rumor floated around that the HVAC system had almost destroyed itself. Had that happened, the entire hospital would have been evacuated.

The night finally ended. By the time dayshift came in, we had mostly caught up. The only lasting effects were a bunch of crazy stories to tell during the morning report.

The official story was the hospital had a server failure and everything happened from that single failure.

Could it have been a server failure? Possibly. Would someone in the healthcare system be crazy enough to leave everything reliant on one piece of equipment? Yup, it happens. Would it surprise me to find out the hospital wired a few million dollars to someone overnight to end a cyber attack? Not at all.

Cyber attacks don’t need to be complicated to be crippling. Taking the HVAC system offline, making all the elevators malfunction, and shutting down the voice over internet phone lines would all have large consequences in a hospital, especially if they weren’t resolved quickly.

Technology and the internet are fantastic resources, but we have to use them in a way we can survive with or without them.

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What Happens During a Cyber Attack on a Hospital?

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