Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador healthcare providers hit by possible ransomware attack

On Saturday 30th of October 2021, healthcare providers and hospitals from the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador experienced a possible ransomware attack. The attack led to the regional health systems having to shut down their networks and thousands of medical appointments were cancelled because of the outage.

It has been confirmed that the outage is a result of a cyber-attack by the Department of Health and Community Services which announced that they had started an investigation into the incident. Although they haven’t confirmed what kind of cyber-attack, they experienced but based on what the Health Minister John Haggie and Eastern Health CEO David Diamond recently said at a media conference earlier today, it is clear that the incident has had a significant impact and has led to a data center being damaged by the attack.