Computer Virus Hits Kern Medical Center

As per the news published by KGET on August 8, 2010, California based Kern Medical Center (KMC) was attacked by a harmful software virus attacking specifically the administrative area.

On July 26, 2010, the virus hit KMC and it took nearly fourteen days to clean off the system. Dale Robbins, Emergency Department, KMC, stated that they were basically flying in the blind, as per the news by KGET on August 8, 2010.

The attack used 13 different kinds of malware, which included viruses and nearly 800 systems were hit. Further, the virus made the system slow so that it became almost impossible to access patient details.

Paul Hensler, Chief Executive Officer, KMC, said that it installed several porn documents on the KMC systems and forced the hospital systems to spit out a stream of gibberish-covered paper, as per the reports by Bakersfield on July 29, 2010.

Hensler added that KMC printers were unattended at the time of virus attack and reams of paper were wasted.

The computer virus is chiefly nasty strain that pushed KMC operations back to the paper age on July 27, 2010 and KMC had to keep the mobile device access, billing systems and administrative servers' offline.

The security experts stated that the hospital had no idea whether it was a prank or anything but the results of such an attack are disastrous.

William Fawns from the county's Information Technology Services claimed that it might have come from an unknown mail attachment and some users probably opened it, as per the news by KGET on August 10, 2010.

In addition, Fawns stated that the virus protection software of the hospital did not detect the electronic infection as it did not know about it.

Such kind of attacks has happened in other hospitals, but the authorities stated that the virus could have been much worse. Steve Dupre, Special Agent, FBI, said that they could not reveal details about other cases of cyber assaults against hospitals resembled to one happened in KMC because those cases are still unsolved, as per the reports by bakersfiled on July 29, 2010.

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