Ransomware attack fallout continues at several CT hospitals

Some services remain down at Eastern Connecticut Health Network and Waterbury Health on Tuesday, days after the hospital systems’ parent company reported being hit by a ransomware attack.

Eastern Connecticut Health Network, or ECHN, operates Manchester Memorial Hospital and Rockville General Hospital in Vernon. Waterbury Health operates Waterbury Hospital. Both are owned by Prospect Medical Holdings, a California-based company that also owns hospitals there as well as in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. 

The company said Tuesday there were no updates and did not answer questions regarding when services and locations that have closed will be back up and running or if confidential information was exposed in the attack.

ECHN’s website as of Tuesday still displayed a banner stating it “along with all Prospect Medical facilities, is experiencing a systemwide outage.”

“We are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible and regret any inconvenience,” the banner stated. It included a link to a page listing which services and locations were closed. 

As of Tuesday, the page said Evergreen and Tolland Imaging, outpatient blood drawing, urgent care and its Women’s Center are closed, along with outpatient medical imaging on weekdays. 

Waterbury Health’s Facebook page also listed several locations or services that were shut down due to the “data security incident.’ 

“We are following downtime procedures including the use of paper records. The outage has affected some of our outpatient services, mostly diagnostic imaging and blood draw and some patient appointments,” the organization said in a post on Tuesday. “We have contacted and will continue to contact any affected patients.”

The post said Waterbury Health’s blood draw locations are closed, except for an outpatient blood drawing location at Waterbury Hospital.

Women’s Imaging and Open MRI in Southbury are both closed, as is Diagnostic Radiology Associates, which has locations in Waterbury, Middlebury and Southbury.

The phrase refers to a type of cyber security breach where adversaries plant malware or break…