Culbertson Hospital Systems Hit With Cyber Attack

By Benjamin Cox on April 16, 2023 at 9:19am

An area hospital’s network was recently disrupted by a cyberattack.

Sarah D. Culbertson Memorial Hospital in Rushville notified the public last Friday that they had to take their network offline, disabling access to most functions in their electronic record keeping and bill pay system. Culberton has clinics located in Rushville, Astoria, and Beardstown.

According to the press release, hospital IT officials immediately retained a third party specialist to investigate suspicious activity that had caused the need to shut the system down. Officials determined that they were a victim of a cyber-security threat. According to WGEM, the cyber-attack occurred on March 30th after employees reported a disruption in the overnight hours while trying to access the hospital’s server.

According to the press release, they have yet to uncover the full depth of any kind of compromise to the hospital’s system. In the meantime, hospital officials said they made upgrades and security improvements to help prevent similar events from occurring in the future.

Full access to the hospital’s critical systems occurred on Tuesday after being under downtime procedures using paper forms to perform regular hospital business. The hospital remained open throughout the course of investigation and did not eliminate any of their services.

Culberton CEO Gregg Snyder told WGEM on Tuesday that it’s still unknown as to if any patient information was compromised.