At least 750 US hospitals dealt with interruptions during the interruption of the crowdstrike last year, the study finds

When, one year He does today, a Buggy Update to the software sold by the Crowdstrike computer security company has demolished millions of computers all over the world and sent them to a spiral of death of repeated restarted, the global cost of all those cramped machines was equivalent to one of the worst IT attacks in history. Some of various estimates Total damage all over the world has extended well into billions of dollars.

Now a new study From a team of medical computer security researchers he took his first steps to quantify the cost of the Crowdstrike disaster not in dollars, but in potential damage to hospitals and their patients in the United States. It reveals evidence that hundreds of services of these hospitals have been interrupted during the interruption and raises concerns on potentially serious effects on the health and well -being of patients.

The researchers of UC San Diego have today marked the one -year anniversary of the Crowdstrike catastrophe by releasing an article in Jama Network Open, a publication of the Journal of American Medical Association Network, which attempts for the first time to create an approximate estimate of the number of hospitals.

A graph that shows a massive peak of the interruptions of the medical service detected on the day of the accidents of Crowdstrike.
For kind granting of UCSD and Jama Network Open

By scanning the parts exposed to the internet of the hospital networks before, during and after the crisis, they found that at least 759 hospitals in the United States seem to have experienced a network breaking of some kind on that day. They found that more than 200 of those hospitals seemed to have been affected specifically with interruptions that directly influenced patients, from inaccessible health recordings and from test scans to fetal monitoring systems that have been offline. Of the 2,232 hospital networks that were able to scan, the researchers found that 34 percent of them seems to have suffered from some type of interruption.

All this indicates that the interruption of crowdstrike could have been a “significant public health problem”, says Christian Dameff, a UCSD emergency medicine doctor and computer security researcher and one of the authors of the document. “If we had had the data of this document a year ago, when this happened,” he adds, “I think we would have been much more worried about the impact that he really had on US health care”.

Crowdstrike, in a statement to Wired, strongly criticized the UCSD study and Jama’s decision to publish it, defining the document “Junk Science”. They note that the researchers did not verify that the interrupted networks performed Windows or Crowdstrike and underline that Azure of Microsoft Cloud Azure suffered a serious interruption on the same day, which may have been responsible for some of the interruptions of the hospital network. “Take conclusions about the impact on the times of inactivity and on the patient without verifying the results with any of the hospitals mentioned is completely irresponsible and scientifically indefensible”, reads the declaration.

“While refusing the methodology and conclusions of this relationship, we recognize the impact that the accident had a year ago,” adds the declaration. “As we said from the beginning, we sincerely apologize to our customers and affected people and continue to focus on strengthening the resilience of our platform and the sector”.