Kettering Health confirms cyberattack involves ransomware, calls incident ‘jarring’

Kettering Health has now confirmed what many people expected: last week’s cyberattack involved ransomware.”At this time, we believe that’s what it was, yes,” said John Weimer, senior vice president and leader for incident command at Kettering Health. Weimer called the attack “jarring.” He said around 5 a.m. last Tuesday, Kettering was made aware of unauthorized access to its system.”As soon as this was realized, we did shut down our IT infrastructure, which essentially means we shut off our door to the world,” Weimer said.With computer systems and many phone lines down, frustrations have been growing among patients and staff members.The scope of the attack is still not fully known.”What we know right now is that apps such as My Chart and those things have not been impacted. Internally, we are working to still understand with our partners if we had employee or patient information compromised,” Weimer said. Multiple sources shared a pop-up message with WLWT, where the healthcare network was given 72 hours to contact the group behind the attack and negotiate.”Throughout our thousands of computers, there was pop-up messages that speak to some demands, but there’s been no direct conversation with us as of yet that I’m aware of,” Weimer said. Weimer said the health care group has not paid ransom.He said, based on similar attacks at other hospitals, recovery could take anywhere from 10 to 21 days.”We are working to be on the lower end of that scale,” Weimer said. Emergency Departments, On-Demand Care, and Urgent Care locations remain open.For urgent medical questions, patients can call 937-600-6879 Monday through Friday from 8 a.m.-5 p.mAfter hours, on weekends and holidays, they can call MatchMD at 1-866-257-5363.