Chelan-Douglas Health District Hit by Two Separate Cyber Attacks

Chelan-Douglas Health District Administrator Luke Davies disclosed Monday that the district had suffered two separate cyber attacks recently.

Davies said the FBI told him last week that their system had been part of a larger sweep by a group conducting ransomware attacks. Although the hackers had found a vulnerability it was caught in time and no information was taken. Davies estimated that had it not been for the efforts of those at LocalTel, CDHD may have been shut down within a week.

"We had another attack that happened on Thursday. This was a separate attack from what we believe is a sperate entity." explained Davies, "(It was a) phishing attack where they got a hold of somebody's emails and we are still evaluating that one."

CDHD has already contacted its insurance company in the case of the second attack. The two entities will take a look at the risk associated with the incident and a forensic review may be called for to see if any personal data was compromised.

The district will most likely need to do a comprehensive cyber-security overhaul. Davies added that some of their systems are a bit antiquated. For example, before the attack CDHD used tape decks to store backups.

CDHD has already begun making changes to its backup procedures, such as now always having a backup unplugged from the system.