Cheyenne Regional payroll impacted by ransomware attack | Local News
CHEYENNE – More than 2,000 employees were affected when the software that Cheyenne Regional Medical Center and its overall health system uses for timekeeping and processing payroll was targeted by a larger scale phishing ransomware attack, the Wyoming Tribune Eagle has learned.
This incident apparently irked some CRMC employees, and it caused some to be overpaid and to have to later reimburse their employer for money they were incorrectly paid that was not really owed to the staffers. Others meanwhile were underpaid, and the hospital was making good on their full paychecks. Some of the systems that CRMC uses for human resources and related issues were down for several months, as the software vendor worked to fully fix all of its systems.
Software company Kronos’ workforce management system, Kronos Private Cloud, went down on Dec. 11. This KPC outage affected 15,000 employers in the U.S. and worldwide, according to a written statement from Cheyenne Regional’s Joanna Vilos, its chief human resources officer.
After the payroll software the health system relies on went dark, multiple departments “worked tirelessly to manually input data and ensure that our employees would continue to receive a paycheck,” Cheyenne Regional said in a previous statement.
“Cheyenne Regional wants to thank everyone in these departments for all they’ve done to work through this difficult situation. We also want to thank our employees for their patience and understanding during this time,” the statement continued.
While Kronos was down, Vilos said, the health system’s payroll department manually processed paychecks for its employees over five pay cycles.
Kronos again became fully functional in early March, the statement said. When Cheyenne Regional could access the payroll system, it “immediately began reconciling all employees’ paychecks,” Vilos said.
Vilos said about 55% of employees were overpaid, while about 45% were underpaid.
“Cheyenne Regional has corrected all the underpayments, and employees have been given several payback options to correct the overpayments, including repaying Cheyenne Regional over an extended period of time,” she continued….
