Universal Health Services (UHS), one of the largest hospital chains in the US, was hit by an apparent cyberattack over the weekend that disrupted IT and phone systems at healthcare facilities in California, Florida, Texas, Arizona and Washington DC.
According to UHS employee reports, the attack occurred on Sunday morning, when various systems in the Emergency Department (ED) began shutting down.
“I was sitting at my computer charting when all of this started,” a UHS employee stated on Reddit. “It was surreal and definitely seemed to propagate over the network. All machines in my department are Dell Win10 boxes. When the attack happened multiple antivirus programs were disabled by the attack and hard drives just lit up with activity. After 1min or so of this the computers logged out and shutdown. When you try to power back on the computers they automatically just shutdown.”
