A cyberattack on Kuwait Health Ministry impacted hospitals in the country

The Kuwait Health Ministry is recovering from a cyberattack that disrupted systems at multiple hospitals and disabled the Sahel healthcare app.

Kuwait’s Health Ministry was the victim of a cyberattack that took systems at several of the country’s hospitals offline. The cyber attack also impacted the Ministry of Health website, which is still offline, and Kuwait’s Sahel healthcare app.

“Kuwaiti Health Ministry announced on Wednesday that many essential features are back and running after a cyberattack that affected systems in some hospitals and the Sahel app. In a press statement, the Ministry said that systems have been restored to their backups including systems at Kuwait Cancer Control Center and administrative systems, like the health insurance and expatriate check-up systems.” reported the website Kuna.net. “After a technical malfunction that affected their systems, their technical teams have tracked the causes and reveled attempts of a breach into their systems, added the Ministry.”

The ministry contained the attack with the help of government security agencies, it also announced measures to enhance the security of its infrastructure.

The ministry pointed out that it has promptly responded to the incident preventing the threat from spreading and reaching core databases. According to the ministry, the healthcare systems were taken offline to secure them.

According to the statement, the affected systems will be completely recovered soon.

Kuwait’s Health Ministry did not disclose details about the attack, however, the measures adopted to prevent the threat from spreading suggest the ministry was the victim of a ransomware attack.

At this time, no ransomware group has taken credit for the cyber incident. 

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Kuwait’s Health Ministry)