Security News > 2020 > September > German Hospital Hacked, Patient Taken to Another City Dies
German authorities said Thursday that what appears to have been a misdirected hacker attack caused the failure of IT systems at a major hospital in Duesseldorf, and a woman who needed urgent admission died after she had to be taken to another city for treatment.
As a consequence, systems gradually crashed and the hospital wasn't able to access data; emergency patients were taken elsewhere and operations postponed.
A report from North Rhine-Westphalia state's justice minister said that 30 servers at the hospital were encrypted last week and an extortion note left on one of the servers, news agency dpa reported.
The note - which called on the addressees to get in touch, but didn't name any sum - was addressed to the Heinrich Heine University, to which the Duesseldorf hospital is affiliated, and not to the hospital itself.
Prosecutors launched an investigation against the unknown perpetrators on suspicion of negligent manslaughter because a patient in a life-threatening condition who was supposed to be taken to the hospital last Friday night was sent instead to a hospital in Wuppertal, a roughly 32-kilometer drive.