Ransomware attackers in Irish healthcare demand ransom, but prime minister refuses to pay

Ransom has since been demanded in the case of the ransomware attack on Ireland’s public health service, but Ireland says it has no intention of paying. The size of the ransom is unknown.

That position has been taken by Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, Reuters reports. “We are very clear: we are not going to pay a ransom.” Furthermore, the Director-General of the Irish Health Service Executive on the radio knew that it was the Conti ransomware and told Reuters that a zero-day vulnerability had been exploited. Ossian Smyth, Ireland’s eGovernment minister, described it as “possibly the most significant cyberattack on the Irish state.”

The ransomware attack took place on Friday morning. With the central IT system of Ireland’s healthcare impacted, healthcare across the country is facing challenges. The systems have been taken offline as a precaution and as a result most Irish healthcare services are currently inactive. If the problems are not solved by Monday, appointments have to be cancelled, but because the system is down, it is not even known who has to be cancelled.

The health service is working with the national cybersecurity team and security experts to stop the attack. The Health Service Executive believes the hackers entered through the patient record system.

It is currently not possible to make new agreements for corona tests, so that people who may have the virus have to go to a walk-in test location on their own initiative. However, they exist in just over half of Ireland’s 26 counties. The portal for booking a vaccine appointment was temporarily offline, but is now working again.