Juan F. Luis Hospital CEO Darlene A. Baptiste says no personal data was stolen in the April cyberattack that forced the hospital offline for months, causing major billing delays, financial losses, and a massive system rebuild now nearly complete.
Ernice Gilbert reports:
The April cyberattack that crippled the Juan F. Luis Hospital’s electronic systems cost the facility between $750,000 and $800,000 a week, according to CEO Darlene A. Baptiste, who says the breach forced months of manual operations and delayed billing but did not result in any stolen patient or staff data.
Speaking Wednesday during the hospital’s “Conversations on Care: Community Dialogue” town hall, Ms. Baptiste detailed how the attack, which occurred on April 26, forced JFL offline for nearly five months and prompted a complete rebuild of its technology infrastructure.
Ms. Baptiste said the hospital was unable to submit electronic bills for months, forcing staff to revert to manual paper billing and resulting in major cash flow delays. “We’re thinking somewhere between $750,000 to $800,000 a week that’s been lost,” she said, before correcting herself to restate: “It’s not lost. It’s not readily accessible in real time, because we’re not submitting our electronic bills in a timely manner.”
The attackers gained access through two local servers, exploiting what JFL’s IT team later described as an overlooked vulnerability. “We had everything guarded — the windows, the doors, everything was sealed. Everything was tested. But what happened? We had what we call a doggy door, and we didn’t protect the doggy door, and they came into there,” she explained.
Read more at the Virgin Islands Consortium.