{"id":506993,"date":"2026-06-23T10:49:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T10:49:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/506993\/"},"modified":"2026-06-23T10:49:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T10:49:11","slug":"how-100-romanian-hospitals-switched-to-pen-and-paper-to-defeat-a-national-cyber-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/506993\/","title":{"rendered":"How 100 Romanian hospitals switched to pen and paper to defeat a national cyber-attack"},"content":{"rendered":"

The attackers had demanded \u20ac160,000 (\u00a3138,000; $183,000) in bitcoin, but a national decision was taken not to pay.<\/p>\n

At hospitals still offline, IT teams raced to restore systems from backups.<\/p>\n

Most had relatively recent copies of their data \u2013 a key lesson. Regular backups allow organisations to recover more quickly.<\/p>\n

Within five days, most hospitals were back online and operating close to normal, with no reported deaths or serious harm to patients.<\/p>\n

It would take weeks longer to input all the new information recorded on paper during the outage. Some data was lost forever.<\/p>\n

Police are not commenting on their investigation into who was behind the attack.<\/p>\n

However, last year a ransomware gang linked to BackMyData had its website taken down in an international operation.<\/p>\n

Four Russians were arrested outside Russia, whose authorities do not co-operate with Western law enforcement.<\/p>\n

Cimpean said the attack could have happened anywhere.<\/p>\n

“The more technology you have, the more digitised you are, the greater the risk,” he said.<\/p>\n

Last year the UK’s NHS health service confirmed a hack on a blood testing company that affected around a dozen medical centres in London contributed to a patient’s death<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It was the first case of a death officially linked to a cyber-attack.<\/p>\n

Around the same time, Change Healthcare in the US was hacked, leading to widespread disruption. The company paid a $22m (\u00a316m) ransom to hackers.<\/p>\n

Hackers also caused chaos later in the year with an attack on another US healthcare provider called Ascension.<\/p>\n

Alina B\u00eezg\u0103 from Bucharest-based cyber-security firm Bitdefender says attacks on hospitals are attractive to criminals who try to cause chaos for money.<\/p>\n

“Hospitals handle critical services, and the criminals think that the more disruption that can be caused, the more likely they are to get paid a ransom,” she said.<\/p>\n

On 23 June BBC World Service is launching a Romanian-language offer, BBC News Rom\u00e2nia to serve audiences in Romania, Moldova and wider Europe with trusted journalism. BBC News Rom\u00e2nia will be available on the website, Facebook and Instagram.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The attackers had demanded \u20ac160,000 (\u00a3138,000; $183,000) in bitcoin, but a national decision was taken not to pay.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":506994,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[163,521,85,46],"class_list":["post-506993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/506994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}