Dublin (AFP)

The Irish public health service, HSE Ireland, on Friday shut down its entire computer system due to a "major" cyberattack using ransomware or "ransomware".

A week after a similar attack wreaking havoc on the distribution of gasoline in the United States, Irish hospitals had to cancel non-urgent appointments to deal with an "international criminal operation".

"There is a significant ransomware attack on HSE's computer systems. As a precaution, we have shut down all of our computer systems to protect them from this attack and to allow us to fully assess the situation with our own security partners," the organization tweeted.

"It's a pretty serious problem," HSE chief executive Paul Reid told state broadcaster RTE.

"We are only at the beginning to fully understand the threat."

According to Mr. Reid, the attack, "an international criminal operation", focuses on accessing data stored on central servers.

This attack does not upset the plans of Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin who is due to meet his British counterpart Boris Johnson on Friday at Checkers, the country residence of British heads of government, his services in Dublin said.

- Back to paper files -

HSE apologized for the inconvenience caused to its patients and clarified that the vaccinations against Covid-19, open to over 50s in Ireland are not affected and "will proceed as planned".

On the other hand, the computer system allowing people in contact with patients to make an appointment to be screened does not work.

Patients can go to walk-in testing centers if they need to.

Dublin's Rotunda Maternity has warned that all outpatient visits have been canceled, except for women who are at least 36 weeks pregnant.

Fergal Malone, responsible for this maternity unit, told RTE that the attack targeted computers storing medical files.

"There is no problem for patient safety," he said and the hospital has switched to paper files.

“But obviously the throughput will be much slower,” he said.

Another maternity hospital in Dublin, the National Maternity Hospital, warned on Twitter that "due to a major IT problem there will be major disruption to all of our services today."

Liz Canavan, a senior official in Micheal Martin's office, said the outage also affected child protection services, which are hosted on HSE servers.

On the other hand, "the emergency services are functioning normally and if you have to go to the hospital, do so," she said at a press conference.

The Irish ambulance service "is also functioning normally without impacting the handling and dispatch of emergency ambulance calls nationally," the HSE said.

The cyberattack suffered by HSE uses ransomware, such as the one targeting Colonial Pipeline, the operator of the huge American oil pipeline, which restarted its entire system Thursday evening after being paralyzed last weekend.

The attack was carried out by the criminal group DarkSide, US federal police said.

Appeared publicly in August 2020, this group of hackers specialize in ransomware attacks against businesses.

Cyber ​​attacks using ransomware are a phenomenon that has exploded in recent years.

Ransomware, or "ransomware", exploits security holes in a business or individual to encrypt and block their computer systems, demanding a ransom to unlock them.

British Foreign Minister Dominic Raab on Wednesday pleaded for the establishment of an international coalition to respond to the growing threat from state actors and criminal groups who prey on democracies with computer attacks, putting involved Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

© 2021 AFP