While patient health records were not affected during a recent cyberattack at Chatham-Kent’s hospital, the personal data of hundreds of current and former employees has been stolen.
The Chatham-Kent Health Alliance (CKHA), Erie Shores HealthCare, Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare, Windsor Regional Hospital, and Bluewater Health were all recently the victims of a ransomware attack, resulting in the theft of patient and staff data.
The attack targeted TransForm Shared Service Organization, which runs technology systems at all five hospitals.
Leadership at all five hospitals made the collective decision not to give in to the demands of the cybercriminals responsible, and as a result, some of the data was published.
“This incident has affected each institution differently. Some are less severely impacted than others. The stolen data is in many formats, some of which are easier to analyze,” hospital leadership said in an update on Monday. “More work must be done to understand precisely which individuals and what data types were taken.”
Locally at CKHA, hospital officials said electronic patient health records have not been affected by the data breach. However, some patient information was accessed through a shared drive, which CKHA is currently analyzing.
CKHA has confirmed that an employee database report was stolen during the cyberattack, containing information about around 1,446 current and former employees. The information taken includes names, addresses, social insurance numbers, gender, marital status, date of birth, and basic pay rate.
No banking information was stolen.
As a result of the data breach, CKHA has been providing two years of complimentary credit monitoring services to employees since October 30.
Local municipal police departments, the Ontario Provincial Police, INTERPOL and the FBI are all currently actively investigating the cyberattack. The Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner has also been notified of the data breach.
The hospitals continue to be affected by a system outage that was caused by the cyberattack on October 23. Hospital officials said a timeline for the ongoing restoration efforts is expected to be released in the coming days.
A patient cybersecurity hotline has also been established for anyone with questions or concerns. The hotline at 519-437-6212 will accept calls between 8 a.m. and 11 p.m., Monday to Friday.
