Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk. With Aviva Insurance.
On the morning of May 14th, 2021, Conti Ransomware infiltrated the HSE IT system. And this cyber attack led to all IT systems within the service shutting down, forcing staff to revert back to pen and paper. And it impacted people right across the country. It was the largest known attack against a health service system in history. And it occurred during the pandemic, if you remember back.
to 2021 and the cost of it is estimated to be around 102 million euro.
Chapter 2: What happened during the Conti ransomware attack on the HSE?
Newstalk's tech correspondent Jess Kelly is here now to look back at the true impact of this cyber attack and ask why it's front of mind as Ireland prepares for the EU presidency. Jess, you're taking us back to dark days now because do you remember at that point where we were with the unmentionable at the time with the pandemic, let's just say it,
It just felt like the end of days then when the ransomware attack happened on top of it.
It did, because again, to try and wind your mind back, the vaccine rollout programme was kind of gaining a bit of momentum. We were in between lockdowns. It felt like maybe there's a bit of light at the end of the tunnel here. We just need to keep calm, carry on. But there was still a level of apprehension in the air.
However, on the faithful day, the 14th of May, I remember listening to news talk. The news kicked off at seven o'clock and it was that HSE services are down. So not only was HSE.ie down, but I spoke subsequently to staff members who told me they were locked out of not only their email accounts, but their devices in their entirety.
patients were showing up for scheduled appointments and there was no way to track, well, Clare Byrne is here, she's meant to be here because the systems were down. Some hospitals had shimmied away from the traditional paper records in favour of digital systems. There were some instances where the paper records couldn't be found at the right time.
There was also, as you said, pandemic measures in place in hospitals. So the hospitals were already juggling an awful lot the health system was juggling an awful lot and then this spanner was thrown into the works which caused chaos not only in the immediate term but also for a long period of time afterwards as well So what do we know now about what exactly happened? It all started very simply.
And this is something that I think made a lot of us sit up straight. So the attack itself, the ransomware was executed on the 14th of May. However, the cyber attackers infiltrated the system on the 18th of March. And they gained access to the system because somebody opened an email. As simple as that. As simple as that. Somebody, it was a phishing attempt
I believe that it was made to look like it was from a legitimate, you know, they had no reason to doubt the legitimacy of the email, opened an attachment and this invisible bit of piece of ransomware just gained access to the system. What's fascinating about this though, and this is where I love the details, I'm a details person. So the email was opened on the 18th of March.
The first movement by the attackers within the HSE digital infrastructure didn't happen until the 7th of May. So why were they sitting in there for so long? Because even though huge holes were found in the HSE cyber integrity, they didn't want to trip any wires.
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Chapter 3: How did the ransomware attack impact healthcare operations in Ireland?
So the attackers gain access to the system and they lie in wait. They make sure that there's no alarms or triggers or tripwires set off in the immediate term. Once they know they have access to the system, then on the 7th of May, they start to explore.
And if you can picture, kind of like Pac-Man, the way he just goes around the system, down the little corridors and so on, that's what this ransomware enabled them to do. So on the 8th of May then, they compromised six voluntary and one statutory hospital. And it wasn't until the 12th of May that they browsed folders and opened files on the HSE system.
And this was not only the inconvenient side of the lockdown of the HSE files, but think of the level of data that hospitals have.
That they had access to, yeah.
It was significant. But then, as we know, as I said, on the 14th, this Conti ransomware was executed. So ransomware, we've spoken so many times on the station over the years about different kinds of cyber attack. So there's the annoying text messages and the annoying scam emails. There's people infiltrating Instagram and WhatsApp and other social profiles. This is a next level up.
So Conti is a piece of software that is remotely and invisibly installed. And ransomware is what it sounds like. So it has the potential to lock down an entire system in lieu of payment.
Now, there's a whole side to the cyber terrorism world that is very, very murky, because not only do you have serious, sophisticated gangs who do this every single day of the week, you also have this thing called ransomware as a service, where you have people who could be sitting in their bedroom or in their mother's living room and will go onto the dark web
purchase this software and execute it themselves and they're not sophisticated and they are not used to doing this and they could accidentally delete the entire system even if you do pay the ransom. So it took a little while to try and identify who and what was behind this particular attack because the fingerprints of it were kind of hard to detect to begin with
A war room was put together a few years ago on Tech Talk. I went down to the National Emergency Coordination Centre, which is where different bodies come together. So obviously you had the HSE, you had the National Cyber Security Centre, you had Angarda Síochána, you had the government, you had everybody coming together to try and put a bit of a response in place.
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