"Tallahassee Hospital Diverting Patients, Canceling Non-emergency Surgeries After Cyberattack"
A cyberattack has prompted a Tallahassee hospital to move patients to other hospitals and cancel all non-emergency surgical procedures. Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare, one of the largest hospitals servicing a 21-county region in north Florida and south Georgia, revealed that it had been forced to take its Information Technology (IT) systems offline because of the security issue. Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare operates a 772-bed acute care hospital, a surgery and adult ICU center, a psychiatric hospital, and more. Although there have been debates over whether ransomware attacks on hospitals can directly contribute to loss of life, multiple experts said events over the last five years were proof that the attacks are causing significant and actual real-world harm. The attack on Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare comes only one day after pro-Russian hackers launched Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks against hospitals in at least 25 US states, knocking many offline for hours. This article continues to discuss the impact of the cyberattack on Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare and the increased targeting of hospitals by cybercriminals.