The disruptions rocking the Newfoundland and Labrador health-care system are due to a cyberattack, Health Minister John Haggie confirmed Wednesday.
Haggie's confirmation comes five days after the IT problems were discovered Saturday morning.
The health minister said government officials have been reluctant to comment on what may have happened because the people who carried out the attack may be monitoring what politicians are saying through the media and in the legislature.
"We need to be careful what we say and what we do," he said. Haggie said he couldn't say when things might return to normal.
"We are not yet clear on the total extent of the failures. We know we have been subject to an attack," Haggie said.
Paul Hepditch, vice-president of the Newfoundland and Labrador Centre for Health Information — which handles the province's health-care IT needs — said their investigation revealed an "unauthorized third party" had compromised the system.
Haggie would not comment on whether there has been communication with the attackers, saying officials didn't want to do anything to jeopardize a rebuilding effort. He said they're following the advice of experts enlisted to help mitigate the attack.
"We are following their advice. They know this area. This is not health care; this is cybersecurity, and these people are world-class in their field," he said.
Sources have told CBC News it was a ransomware attack, a breach in which data or systems are encrypted until a ransom is paid, but Haggie said he would not specify the sort of cyberattack that has occurred.
While the cyberattack has affected all of the province's health authorities to varying degrees, Western Health was initially thought to be the least affected. However, upon further investigation, that situation has changed, Hepditch said, and "the safe thing to do" was to take that health authority offline as well.
A price tag on repairing the damage is also unknown.
"We want this fixed. We'll do whatever it takes, and we'll work out the price later," said Haggie.
Eastern Health, the largest and hardest-hit health authority, has been reduced to handling only urgent and emergency procedures, with staff working largely on a paper-based system, resulting in thousands of cancellations of appointments.
CEO David Diamond said if anyone has travelled to the St. John's area for specialist treatments only to find them cancelled, they should contact the health authority to see what can be done.
While there's no timeline yet to getting back up and running, Diamond said restoring cancer treatments is one of the big priorities when it comes to patient care.
This is a breaking news update. A previous version of this story is below.
Health officials are set to provide an update on the IT outages plaguing Newfoundland and Labrador's health-care system, as the disruptions caused by a suspected cyberattack drag into Day 5.
Health Minister John Haggie, Eastern Health CEO David Diamond and Pat Hepditch, a vice-president with the Newfoundland and Labrador Centre for Health Information, will speak in a media briefing, live streamed on the provincial government's YouTube page, at 11 a.m. NT.
Officials have been cautious and cagey up to this point on the exact source of the problem, refusing to reveal basic details about what happened or even confirm whether a cyberattack is at the heart of the issue.
Sources have told CBC News that the computer network failure is due to a ransomware attack, a type of cybersecurity breach where hackers take control of a system and only let go once a ransom has been paid.
What is clear is that the outage affected what Haggie has called "the brain" of the IT system that handles the province's health care, resulting in thousands of cancellations in everything from surgeries to X-rays to ultrasounds.
Eastern Health, the province's largest health authority, has been the hardest hit, with staff reverting to a largely paper-based system to handle emergency care.
Contingency plan in the works
Newfoundland and Labrador's four regional health authorities continue to postpone some procedures and resort to largely offline practices to deliver others.
That status quo will last, at the very least, through Wednesday and Thursday, Debbie Walsh, Eastern Health's vice-president of clinical services, said Wednesday morning.
Amid the delays, she said staff are working on a contingency plan for when the systems are back up and running. Thanks to the experiences gleaned from the massive snowstorm of January 2020 and COVID-19 lockdowns, she said the backlog of appointments will be able to be rescheduled "within days."
But that rescheduling can only happen when the IT system is working again, a date thus far unknown.
Read more articles from CBC Newfoundland and Labrador
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2021-11-03 14:10:29Z
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