University of Iowa Health Care websites restored

IOWA CITY — University of Iowa Health Care’s websites were back up and running Wednesday morning after an outage Tuesday knocked them down for hours.

The temporary outage affected service to the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, Stead Family Children’s Hospital, and Carver College of Medicine websites Tuesday afternoon.

UIHC officials haven’t answered questions about when the outage started and how long the sites were down. They also haven’t answered questions about what caused the outage and whether it was the result of a cyberattack.

In a statement Wednesday, UIHC spokeswoman Molly Rossiter said the websites were restored “following information technology interventions with our partners.”

The outage, she said, didn’t interrupt patient care. And none of the affected websites contain patient data or information.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center issued a report warning that the “hacktivist group KillNet had in the past targeted U.S. health care organizations “and is actively targeting the health and public health sector.”

KillNet, according to that report, is a year-old pro-Russian group known for campaigns against countries supporting Ukraine — like those in NATO.

The group’s main type of cyberattack is “distributed denial-of-service" — known as DDoS — and is meant to disrupt the regular traffic of a targeted server, according to the federal report.

Although the group’s DDoS attacks typically don’t cause significant damage, they can down service for hours or days, the report said.

BetterCyber, a technology security company, on Tuesday posted on social media that KillNet had attacked U.S. health care organizations coast to coast — attaching to its tweet a list of affected websites that included uihc.org, the UI Health Care domain.

On Wednesday, Becker’s Health IT published a story reporting KillNet on Tuesday claimed the downing of multiple hospital and health system websites nationwide.

That story identified several affected entities — including Stanford Health Care; Los Angeles-based Cedars-Sinai Medical Center; and Charlotte, N.C.-based Atrium Health.

In the HHS warning this week, federal officials identified practical steps health care entities can take to respond, “in the event your service is subjected to an attack.”

Those include understanding the vulnerable points in your service that can be overloaded or exhausted; making sure service providers are ready to handle resource exhaustion; ensuring your service can scale to deal with surges; having in place a response plan; and testing and monitoring regularly.

UIHC didn’t answer questions from The Gazette about specifics it took this week to address the issues or prevent future outages.

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com