WAKEEENEY—Trego County Lemke Memorial Hospital began experiencing a computer network disruption on May 6, according to a media release from the hospital.
In response, the hospital immediately activated its incident response plan and began investigating the issue with its IT team and third-party specialists.
The investigation confirmed the hospital had been targeted by a sophisticated ransomware attack, which we promptly reported to the FBI.
Since day one of this incident, the IT team and third-party specialists have worked tirelessly to safely restore affected systems, minimize any impact on our ability to serve patients and implement additional security features to further secure our network.
"We’d like to thank our doctors and all staff for their hard work continuing hospital operations during network restoration efforts, which are in their final stages. The hospital is currently operating at normal capacity," the hospital said in a press release.
While we are still determining the full scope of potential impact on data stored on our network, we have no reason to believe the criminal perpetrators of this incident accessed or stole any personal identification information and/or protected health information from our network, the press release said.
Therefore, we do not believe there is any risk to the security of any such information. We will update our community and any impacted individuals should this conclusion change, the press release said.
The hospital IT team will be using lessons learned from this incident to further harden our network amid what is a constantly changing cybersecurity landscape.
This incident is also an important reminder for all of us to remain vigilant about cybersecurity, especially amid continued and escalating threats from criminal actors who routinely target health care providers across the country, the press release said.