Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare (TMH) took its computer systems offline and suspended elective procedures following a cyberattack on Thursday evening.

TMH is a private, not-for-profit healthcare system that serves a 21-county region of northern Florida and southern Georgia through acute care and psychiatric hospitals, multiple specialty care centers, and 38 affiliated medical practices.

While all of its network systems were brought online, TMH says this attack only affected some of them.

“Our IT department detected this security issue early on and proactively shut down our IT systems to limit the impact,” TMH said in a statement released Friday.

“We are in the process of reviewing each of our IT systems, prioritizing them and bringing them back online one by one.

“We don’t currently have a timetable for how long this will take as this is an emerging situation, but we will continue to provide updates.

The regional hospital added that patients whose appointments were affected due to this security breach would be contacted by their providers or healthcare facilities.

See our 12 p.m. update below. We will also continue to post updates to https://t.co/UGsradFmx8. pic.twitter.com/pn1KWWy8Vz

— Tallahassee Memorial (@TMHFORLIFE) February 3, 2023

Patients who require emergency medical services (EMS) will also be redirected to other hospitals, as TMH will only accept level 1 trauma from its immediate service area.

“Patient safety remains our number one priority. We apologize for any inconvenience or delay. We will provide additional updates as they become available,” TMH said. said.

“Our organization follows existing protocols for system downtime and takes steps to minimize disruptions.”

The hospital reported the incident to law enforcement after the breach was discovered and is now working with them in an ongoing investigation.

Second suspected ransomware attack targeting hospitals this year

The incident is suspected to be the result of a ransomware attack, according to local media reports who cited inside information from sources with knowledge of the situation.

Throughout the past year, the federal government has warned of ransomware operations known to actively target healthcare organizations across the United States.

For example, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has warned against Royal. Venus, maui, and Zeppelin ransomware operations actively targeting health and public health (HPH) organizations across the country.

CISA, FBI and HHS also warned in October that cybercrime group Daixin Team was also attacking the HPS sector in ongoing ransomware attacks.

“This is the second suspected ransomware incident involving US hospitals in 2023. Last year, there were 25 attacks on healthcare systems operating 290 hospitals,” said Emsisoft Threat Analyst. Brett Callow says BleepingComputer.

Atlantic General Hospital in Maryland was also hit by a ransomware attack over the weekend, according to a report local media WMDT47.