At Least 750 US Hospitals Faced Disruptions During Last Year’s CrowdStrike Outage, Study Finds
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Summary
One year ago, a bug in US cybersecurity company CrowdStrike’s software caused millions of computers globally to crash, akin to a massive cyberattack and costing billions.
Now a team of medical cybersecurity researchers has produced the first analysis of the economic cost in potential harm to hospitals and patients across the US, finding evidence that hundreds of hospital services were disrupted.
They scanned internet-exposed parts of hospital networks, identifying a minimum of 759 hospitals in the US that experienced network disruptions, of which over 200 directly affected patients through health record and monitoring outages.
The study indicates that the CrowdStrike outage represented a significant public health issue, and the researchers suggest that the true number of impacted medical facilities may be several times higher, as they could only scan around a third of America’s hospitals.
