The ransomware attack on a hospital in Alabama in 2019 may have directly caused the death of a newborn baby. The baby’s mother is now preparing to file what will be the first “ransomware murder case” in history.
On the eighth day of the three-week cyberattack on Springhill Medical Center on July 16, 2019, Teiranni Kidd gave birth to her daughter, Nicko Silar, in a planned birth, The Wall Street Journal reported. Nicko was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and suffered severe brain damage as a result. He died nine months later. According to the lawsuit, the hospital missed vital signs—that is, a dangerously accelerated fetal heartbeat—that could have required a cesarean section and potentially saved Nicko’s life.
Court files allege that, in addition to affecting equipment that monitors fetal heartbeat, the attack deprived the hospital of access to patient health records and the wireless monitoring system used to locate staff was inoperative.
Denying any wrongdoing, the hospital refused to pay the ransom and tried to continue operating as usual despite the attack, which disabled IT systems for more than three weeks, the WSJ reported. CEO Jeffery St. Clair told the WSJ they “concluded it was safe” to continue.
The case was brought to the hospital and to the obstetrician who was involved in Nicko’s birth, Dr. He demands an unspecified amount of money from Katelyn Parnell. Kidd claims he was unaware of the seriousness of the cyberattack, which could affect his decision to choose Springhill Medical Center.
The case also includes a text conversation between Parnell and the head nurse. Parnell describes the baby’s death as “preventable” in the texts and says she would “100%” do a cesarean if she saw the heart monitor reading.
While this is not the first alleged ransomware death, it is the first to go to court. If successful, it will be the first time a ransomware attack has been officially recognized as directly responsible for a death.
A woman died last year, who had to be transferred to a distant hospital after a similar attack on a German hospital. The lengthy transport had potentially hampered the care the woman needed, and prosecutors in Cologne, Germany, launched an investigation into the cause of death for negligence. However, the charges were later dropped and the patient was determined to have died of other causes.
And it seems that these are not special and rare events. Two-thirds of healthcare organizations report being victims of ransomware attacks, which appear to have increased in number in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost a quarter of these attacks resulted in increased death rates, according to a survey by cybersecurity company Censinet. These findings show that cyber attacks pose serious potential health risks as well as present financial and logistical problems, and cause the cybersecurity of hospitals and healthcare organizations to be questioned.
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