It was recently reported that the IT outage that affected the Newfoundland healthcare system was caused by a cyberattack.

Indeed, an investigation is open to identify the origin of the attack and determine if it was a ransomware attack. It is still unclear if digital data such as patient records, lab results, and x-rays were lost or not.

Thankfully, backups at the provincial levels exist and the center is working hard to understand fully the attack. As a result, the province’s Western Health region had to cancel all but emergency services to the 80,000 people it covers.