Palomar Health Medical Group affected by potential cyber attack

Patients at Palomar Health Medical Group in North County are experiencing delays since the medical provider discovered suspicious activity on its computer network on Sunday.

Palomar acknowledged the situation in a brief statement released Tuesday, saying it had no impact on operations at its two hospitals in Escondido and Poway. However, the organization has provided few details about how the incident affected patient care.

The statement said the medical group’s “phones, faxes and portal are currently not operational” and apologized to patients, who the statement said “may experience delays.”

However, Palomar did not respond to requests for further information about how many patient appointments were delayed or rescheduled due to the investigation.

It’s common practice for companies to immediately lock down technology assets when suspicious activity is detected to prevent the spread of a potential malware attack, and that’s exactly what happened at the medical group, according to the alert. Palomar says it has hired outside experts to get to the root cause of the suspicious activity.

Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside became the latest local healthcare organization to take similar action when malware appeared on its network in late November 2023. Cyber ​​extortionists used a type of malware called “ransomware” to try to extort cash from the public district hospital and even posted stolen records on a dark corner of the Internet called the Dark Web.

Tri-City’s operations were severely impacted for more than a week, significantly shorter than the month in which Scripps Health found its operations were in trouble following a ransomware attack in 2021, resulting in estimated lost revenue in amount of 113 million US dollars.

Meanwhile, the Palomar Health breach appears to be less serious, although operations appear to have been impacted.

An internal “emergency alert” obtained by the San Diego Union-Tribune, reportedly sent to medical professionals after the attack, shows that Palomar instructed workers to use smartphone-based software to communicate and to resource those resources “with paper-based charts ” to use. ” as a workaround, while “an external investigator” “conducts a forensic analysis of which systems are affected and to ensure their recovery.”

Palomar Health Medical Group was formed in 2019 through the merger of Arch Health Partners Medical Group and Graybill Medical Group lists 10 different operating locations, primarily in Escondido, with individual locations in Poway, Fallbrook and Murrieta.