Last week the Brno University Hospital in the city of Brno, Czech Republic, one of the centers responsible for treating patients with COVID-19, as well as for running tests for the novel coronavirus, has been forced to shut down its systems due to a cyber attack.
While the hospital’s officials have not disclosed the nature of the security breach, it is understood that the attack was deemed severe enough to postpone urgent surgical operations and divert all new acute patients to nearby clinics.
The cyber attack occurred on Friday morning at around 2:00 local time. According to hospital director Jaroslav Štěrba, due to the incident some computer operations were limited and staff had to revert to writing the information and receipts by hand. He said that some key clinical systems were working, but the hospital had lost the ability to transfer information from these systems to its database system.
"Gradually, the individual systems were falling, so all computers had to be shut down," he said.
It is unclear, if the hospital's coronavirus testing capability was affected by the cyber attack.
The hospital’s IT team informed the Czech National Cyber Security Center and the Czech police, who combined the efforts to resolve the incident.