Hospital Clínic expects all elective surgeries and 50% of outpatient visits to go ahead Thursday

Hospital Clínic is slowly recovering from the cyberattack on its virtual servers that was detected last Sunday. 

The medical center, which is one of Barcelona's biggest hospitals, expects to be back performing all elective surgeries and 50% of outpatient visits by Thursday.

On Wednesday, the planned activity was carried out as normal, with 25% of outpatient consultations and 70% of scheduled surgeries taking place.

In the first two days after the cyberattack was detected, no elective surgeries or outpatient visits were able to take place. 

An estimated 150 operations, 2,000 to 3,000 outpatient visits, and up to 400 extractions were canceled on Monday alone, and while the hospital continued to provide emergency care to patients who arrived by their own means, ambulances had been rerouted to other medical centers in Barcelona, l'Hospitalet de Llobregat, and Badalona. 

The Cybersecurity Agency of Catalonia and the hospital are still analyzing the situation and performing recovery tasks for the IT system. 

Meanwhile, The government says that a recovery plan has been implemented since March 5 to prevent a new attack of this nature. The plan includes actions to stop the attacker's activity, the rollout of updated technologies in the system, and the integration of the Cybersecurity Agency of Catalonia's protection capabilities with the hospital.

Recovery efforts are currently focused on restoring the core infrastructure support elements and the elements that support the hospital's most critical processes. The initial estimate is that this task can be completed in the next few days.

Priority radiation oncology patients are being referred to Hospital de Sant Pau and Hospital Vall d'Hebron.

Patients who will be able to visit will receive a call from the hospital to confirm the visit and those who will be rescheduled will be notified shortly. 

Cybercriminals inside systems for up to 'months'

David López, a cybersecurity expert with more than 20 years of experience focusing on IT security and data protection, estimates that an attack such as the one hitting Hospital Clínic currently would likely mean that the criminals have been inside the hospital's systems for "days, weeks, or even months."

"A ransomware attack doesn't happen in one day, it has various phases and the last phase, decrypting the data, is the last phase when the company being attacked realizes it," he told Catalan News.

López believes that the threat of such cyber attacks is something that the world is going to have to learn to "coexist" with and that companies and organizations need to invest more in protecting their vulnerabilities in the face of this constant danger.