The Swedish Public Health Agency temporarily closed down the country’s infectious diseases database SmiNet following several hacking attempts.
According to Bleeping Computer, SmiNet was shut down last Thursday in order to investigate the attacks before coming back online the day after. SmiNet is also used to store electronic reports with Covid-19 infection statistics.
The agency claimed that it had discovered there had been several ‘attempted intrusions’ into the SmiNet database, leading it to close the database temporarily. Due to this closure, the Swedish Public Health Agency was unable to report complete Covid-19 statistics last Wednesday.
The investigation is currently still ongoing, with the agency claiming it will take at least a few more days until the reporting process will be restarted.
This follows a recent attack in Ireland, where the country’s healthcare service was temporarily forced to shut down its computer systems as a precaution following a significant ransomware attack.
It was later found that the Irish healthcare IT systems were breached by Conti ransomware operators. The FBI claimed that the Conti ransomware group has also previously attempted to breach the network of numerous US healthcare and first responder organisations.
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