Russian hackers are claiming responsibility for a cyberattack that brought down the websites of more than a dozen US hospitals Monday morning.
Killnet, a pro-Russia group known for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks over the past year, says it took down the websites of 14 US hospitals.These include Stanford Healthcare, Duke University Hospital and Cedars-Sinai.
DailyMail.com found seven hospital websites were back in service by 12pm EST. It is unclear why these specific websites were targeted, but the hacking group is known for attacks in nations like the US that have opposed Russia’s .
Previous Killnet targets in the US.
Stanford Healthcare is among the 14 hospital systems that was impacted by a Monday morning DDoS attack from a Russian hacking group
Michigan Medicine, and its associated Children’s Hospital, was impacted by the DDoS attack from the Russian hacking group Killnet
The hospitals affected by the hack are from all over the country.
It is unclear how the outage may have affected internal hospital systems or impacted patient care.
The University of Michigan told DailyMail.com no patient information was impacted by the attack.
Hospitals in the Netherlands were also reportedly impacted by a DDoS attack from Russian hacking groups this morning too.
These attacks work by attempting to overwhelm a website’s servers by flooding it with traffic.
Using a network of machines – usually infected with malware and being operated remotely – will connect to the IP address of a website simultaneously.
Hackers can overwhelm a website’s servers by connecting thousands of machines to it at once.
As a result, those hoping to visit the impacted website will be caught in the ‘traffic jam’ of users connecting and receive an error JetBlack message.
<div class="art-ins mol-factbox floatRHS health" data-version="2" id="mol-1ccfdbf0-a0c1-11ed-925e-1b069cce61e3" website US hospital websites down during ongoing cyberattack