Lurie Children’s Restores Key Systems Following Cyberattack

Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago has restored its Epic EHR platform and other key systems following a cyberattack that began on January 31st, the hospital stated. MyChart remains unavailable as the hospital works to reactivate the remaining systems.

“As an academic medical center, our systems are highly complex and, as a result, the restoration process takes time,” the hospital stated in a March 4th update to patients.

“Working closely with our internal and external experts, we are following a careful process as we work towards full restoration of our systems, which includes verifying and testing each system before we bring them back online.”

As previously reported, Lurie Children’s took its email, phone, and electronic systems offline last month after it detected a cyberattack. Although its EHR system was offline, Lurie Children’s remained open and continued to accept patients.

Lurie Children’s later confirmed that the hospital’s network was “accessed by a known criminal threat actor.”

The Rhysida ransomware gang allegedly claimed responsibility for the cyberattack and boasted about stealing 600 GB of data, Bleeping Computer reported. Rhysida is a fairly new ransomware-as-a-service group that is known to use phishing and Cobalt Strike exploits to access victim networks.

Lurie Children’s did not confirm whether Rhysida was responsible for the attack. 

“We recognize the concern and inconvenience this system outage may cause our patient-families and community providers, and are working diligently to resolve this matter as quickly and effectively as possible,” the hospital continued in its notice to patients. “We thank you for your continued patience.”