The patient was in a critical situation and was headed towards Düsseldorf University Hospital for a revitalizing treatment on September 11. But a ransom ware attack on the computer system of the hospital had jumbled the data. The computer system was made unserviceable. Due to the hack, the female patient could not be admitted to the hospital. The woman was then shifted to another hospital that was about 19 miles away. The long distance between the two hospitals disallowed the female patient from receiving revitalizing treatment that she badly required.

As a result, the patient passed away in a hospital in Wuppertal. A negligent homicide case had been officially launched by the prosecutors in Cologne who claimed that the hackers can be blamed for the woman’s death. Detectives had collaborated with cyber-security experts to conclude that whether or not the hackers were responsible for the patient’s death. The former chief executive of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, Ciaran Martin asserted that if the hackers were found to be accountable for the patient’s death then it would be the ‘first death directly caused by a cyber-attack’.

Even the hospital would be interrogated. The president of Germany’s National Cyber- Security authority, Arne Schönbohm said that the officials had come on site to facilitate the hospital’s IT staff in order to rebuild the computer system. He even warned other organizations to protect their systems as hackers had misused a well-known vulnerability in a piece of Virtual Private Network software, developed by Citrix. He commented that they had warned of the vulnerability as early as January. He even said that he had pointed out the consequences of its exploitation.

Arne further said that attackers can get into the internal network systems and paralyze those months later. He also added that the purpose of ransomware was to make money but unfortunately it ceases the system. Thus, if these attacks happen on a hospital’s computer system, such incidents were most likely to happen. He even affirmed that this shows the seriousness of authorities towards their system security.

Martin said that it was not at all surprising that the origin of the issue was a ransomware attack by criminals rather than an attack by a nation state of terrorists. Some local reports suggested that the hackers did not intend to attack the hospital but were planning to attack a university. The hackers demanded payment from Heinrich Heine University, in a digital note that was sent during the attack. But it had cognate to a different location (hospital).

As soon as the hackers realized their mistake, they gave the Düsseldorf University Hospital the decryption key without asking for the payment and then disappeared.

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