“We had a cyber attack on Wednesday night,” said Mitesh Popat, the Clinics’ CEO, said on Friday. “We’re hoping to get systems back up and running by tomorrow or maybe even tonight. It’s been a challenging couple of days.”
Popat said the hackers locked down the clinics’ computer system and demanded a ransom before unlocking it. Popat said at the advice of its network operator, the unidentified hacker was paid some amount of ransom. He would not disclose the amount.
“Patient care is continuing,” Popat said. “We’ve been on paper the last couple of days. We don’t anticipate a major data loss, but we’re thinking there might be minor patient data loss just from recovering processes.
“No patient data was compromised,” he said.
In 2016, Marin Medical Practices Concepts, a Novato company that provides medical billing and electronic medical records services to many Marin physicians, had its computer system hacked and paid a ransom to regain access to its data.
The Marin Healthcare District and Prima Medical Foundation later notified more than 5,000 patients that some of their medical data was lost due to a glitch that followed the ransomware attack.
©2019 The Marin Independent Journal (Novato, Calif.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
