German hospital hacked:

German authorities said Thursday that what appears to have been a misdirected hacker attack caused the failure of IT systems at a major hospital in Duesseldorf, and a woman who needed urgent admission died after she had to be taken to another city for treatment.

The Duesseldorf University Clinic’s systems have been disrupted since last Thursday. The hospital said investigators have found that the source of the problem was a hacker attack on a weak spot in “widely used commercial add-on software,” which it didn’t identify.

As a consequence, systems gradually crashed and the hospital wasn’t able to access data; emergency patients were taken elsewhere and operations postponed.

The hospital said that that “there was no concrete ransom demand.” It added that there are no indications that data is irretrievably lost and that its IT systems are being gradually restarted. (AP)