At least 750 American hospitals were confronted with disturbances during the crowdstrike loss last year, study finds

When, a year ago today, a Buggy update Software sold by the cyber security company Crowdstrike, crowdstrike brought millions of computers around the world and sent them in a death spiral of repeated reboots, the worldwide cost of all those crashed machines were equal to one of the worst cyber attacks in history. Part of the several estimates From the total damage worldwide it is well extended to billions of dollars.

Now one one New study A team of medical cyber security researchers has taken the first steps not to quantify the costs of Crowdstrike’s disaster in dollars, but in possible damage to hospitals and their patients in the US. It reveals evidence that hundreds of the services of those hospitals were disrupted during the malfunction and is concerned about potentially serious effects on the health and well -being of patients.

Researchers from the University of California San Diego today marked the one -year -old birthday of the Catastrophe of Crowdstrike by releasing a paper in Jama Network, a publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association Network, which for the first time was to make a raw estimate of the number of hospitals of which the networks were on which the networks were on which the networks were networking Networks have become.

A graph that shows a huge peak in detected medical service cases on the day of Crowdstrike’s Crashes.

Thanks to UCSD and Jama Network Open

By scanning the internet exposed to the internet before, during and after the crisis, they have detected that on that day at least 759 hospitals in the US seem to have experienced a network disturbance on that day. They discovered that more than 200 of those hospitals seemed to have been specifically affected with malfunctions that directly affected patients, from inaccessible health files and test scans to fetal monitoring systems that went offline. Of the 2,232 hospital networks that they could scan, the researchers discovered that 34 percent of them seemed to have had completely disruption.

All this indicates that the Crowdstrike failure could have been a ‘significant public health problem’, claims that Christian Dameff, a UCSD doctor for Emergency Care Provider and researcher of CyberSecurity, and one of the authors of the article. “If we had had the data of this article a year ago when this happened,” he adds: “I think we would have worried much more about how much impact it really had on American health care.”

In a statement to Wired Sterk, Crowdstrike criticized the UCSD study and Jama’s decision to publish it and called the newspaper ‘Junk Science’. They note that the researchers have not verified that the disturbed networks have carried out Windows or Crowdstrike software and point out that Microsoft’s Cloud Service Azure experienced a major malfunction on the same day, which may have been responsible for some disruptions from the hospital network. “Drawing conclusions about downtime and impact of the patient without verifying the findings with one of the aforementioned hospitals is completely irresponsible and scientifically indefensible,” is the explanation.

“Although we reject the methodology and conclusions of this report, we acknowledge the impact that the incident had a year ago,” adds the statement. “As we said from the start, we sincerely apologize to our customers and the affected and we continue to concentrate on strengthening the resilience of our platform and industry.”