a widespread it outage is affecting major companies around the world this outage has been wreaking havoc on hospitals this was probably the biggest event that I've seen of this magnitude in my career for John Donahue vice president of corporate Information Services at pen medicine and Philadelphia hospitals that's going to take weeks to recover from that July 19th was a day he'll never forget I got the first phone call about 1:30 in the morning on Friday and my first thought this can't be true this is some okay passeng on Del from airports to hospitals a software
update from cyber security company crowd strike crashed computer systems around the globe initially this looked like a Cyber attack it did though it wasn't a Cyber attack for many hospitals it was their first time experiencing what one could be like it required a physical touch at every file server and every device close to 60,000 devices in total and doctors and nurses were thrown into new territory we couldn't access anything on the computers nurses like Melissa Jew resorting to pen and paper to write down patient information the crowd strike incident forced many medical procedures here at
Penn Medicine to come to a complete standstill but some potentially life-saving treatments couldn't wait Dr Allison Lauren was scheduled to conduct a bone marrow Harvest that day in one word what was that day like for you um scary ultimately pulling it off with paper records cell phones and Trust in her team Kevin Mahoney CEO of the University of Pennsylvania health system says this was a wakeup call the Health Care system is not prepared for these enormous cyber attacks in 2023 the FBI says 249 ransomware attacks targeted Healthcare institutions across the country and earlier this year
Ascension one of the nation's largest healthc Care Systems made headlines after they experienced a Cyber attack what being demonstrated here pen medicine now finding ways to protect themselves from potential attacks so what we have here is a threat map and this shows us globally what's happening from a cyber perspective so this map is another Cyber attack map that we use to spot Trends it's focused on spam volume and malware volume is this something you use daily our cyber team would use this daily getting ready now to prevent a catastrophe in the future Valerie Castro NBC
News Philadelphia thanks for watching stay updated about breaking news and top stories on the NBC News app or follow us on social media
