On the other side of the Atlantic, concern is rising over a series of cyberattacks directed at hospitals across France, and French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday, Feb. 18 announced that the French government would spend 1 billion euros to combat healthcare cybercrime.
As a Feb. 16 report in France24 noted, “Ransomware attacks struck two French hospital systems in less than a week, prompting the transfer of some patients to other facilities but not affecting care for Covid-19 patients or virus vaccinations. The two French hospital systems were stricken with ransomware attacks, and a third pre-emptively cut connections with an IT provider, in less than a week, prompting the transfer of some patients to other facilities. The Villefranche-sur-Saône hospital system in France’s eastern Rhone department announced Monday that a cyber attack had been detected at 4:30 AM local time. The attack by the crypto-virus RYUK, a kind of ransomware, ‘strongly impacts’ the Villefranche, Tarare and Trévoux sites of the North-West Hospital, the hospital said in a statement.”
The France24 report noted that “Each hospital site’s team immediately set up limited procedures to ensure the exchange of information necessary for patient care, as well as a crisis unit to organise the operation of all three sites. There are no scheduled transfers for patients in intensive care at Villefranche, nor for infants in the neonatal department, and Covid-19 vaccinations are continuing. However, Tuesday’s slate of surgeries were postponed, and two sites are coordinating with the regional health agency to refer emergency patients to other facilities.”
The France24 report went on to note that “France’s National Agency for the Security of Information Systems (ANSSI) is helping to investigate the attack. The North-West Hospital’s statement came on the same day that ANSSI said it had discovered a hack of several organizations that bore the hallmarks of a group linked to Russian intelligence.”
Meanwhile, in the newsmagazine L’Express, Maxime Recoquillé wrote, also on Feb. 16, that “In recent days, the hospitals of Dax [in the department of Landes, near Bayonne, in the far southwest of France] and Villefranche-sur-Saône have been victims of ransomware-type cyberattacks, paralyzing their computer systems. These hacks for (high) profit which also target companies and administrations are more and more frequent. But since the appearance of Covid-19, healthcare organizations seem to be a high-value target for hackers, and not only in France. Cyber attacks against hospitals have increased by 500 percent worldwide, assures the audit firm PwC in particular. The consequences can be serious: deprogramming of heavy operations, risky transfers of patients.”
Recoquillé interviewed Loïc Guézo, secretary general of Clusif, an association of French cybersecurity specialists, who told him that “Hospitals seem to be becoming an increasingly frequent target. We can imagine that in the minds of hackers, these establishments under stress due to COVID, are therefore more likely to pay quickly. But the ransomware has actually been around for several years. As with COVID-19, there are variants, the virus is evolving. Groups that attacked industries and businesses a few years ago now find better protected access doors. They are therefore constantly looking for new ‘markets.’ Small hospitals are also part of this logic,” Guézo said.
Given the danger, President Macron announced the government’s new strategy on Thursday. As Kathleen Comte of FranceBleu reported on Feb. 18, “After the two computer attacks which affected the hospital of Dax and that of Villefranche-sur-Saône, Emmanuel Macron first spoke this Thursday by videoconference with the teams of the two hospitals. Cédric O, Secretary of State for Digital Transition and Electronic Communications, and Guillaume Poupard, Director General of the National Agency for Information Systems Security (ANSSI), also participated in these videoconferences. The President then presented a plan for cybersecurity with a budget of one billion euros. A cybercampus will also be created in the second half of 2021 in the district of La Défense in Paris with around sixty of the main public and private stakeholder organizations in the sector. The goal is to set up a "security ecosystem, more united and more efficient". More specifically, the executive has planned to allocate one billion euros, including 720 million public funds, to strengthen the sector, triple its turnover to 25 billion euros in 2025 and double its workforce. Emmanuel Macron also recalled ‘the importance of accelerating and investing.’”
President Macron’s action on Thursday followed an appeal three days earlier by the national hospital association of France. According to a Feb. 18 radio report by Clara Lecocq Réale on the radio program France Culture, “’Hospitals must be among the targets that are protected at the first level,’ the Hospital Federation of France urged on Monday.”
