The North Shore Health Network is recovering from a cyber incident that began yesterday.
As reported earlier from a public announcement made today by the health network, the incident affected all three locations, Blind River, Thessalon and Richards Landing. The story is here.
President and CEO Tim Vine told ElliotLakeToday, “Yesterday, we experienced a cyber incident. There is, at this stage, no loss of data or corruption of our files, but out of an abundance of caution we have isolated our networks from the larger Northeast network and been isolated from the eHealth Ontario network.”
Vine said it has two major ramifications affecting all three sites. Currently, there is no internet access and there is no access to the regional medical record.
He said the health network was working on a workaround to resolve that issue.
"There was no ransom, there was no loss of data, there was no compromise of health information or private information that we are aware of at this point. All of the steps taken to date have been done out of caution to ensure that there was not any further action that was taken by bad actors within our network," Vine said.
The health network is doing a validation of the network before returning to an online status.
“Mostly we are doing this out of an abundance of caution, working with the region, but again, we have to validate before we come back online, and it's just been a little bit more complicated to get that validation done than we had anticipated, mostly because of the size of the networks that need to be scanned.”
A third-party security firm is assisting the process.
“We may have access to our local network as soon as late afternoon, like 4 or 5 o'clock today,” he said adding, “As you know, it's very difficult to estimate.”
Vine said, “once the validation is complete, we'll work with eHealth to restore the tunnel to the eHealth network.”