‘PREVENTABLE’

Baby Dies After Hospital Hit by Ransomware Attack: Suit

An Alabama medical center is accused of inadvertently causing the first ransomware death with mistakes in their handling of computer outages.

An Alabama woman has filed a lawsuit against a medical center where she says staff caused her baby’s death by making mistakes amid a ransomware attack. If Teiranni Kidd, the plaintiff, wins in court, it will be the first confirmed case of a death due to a ransomware hack. Her filing states that by the time she came to Springhill Medical Center in July 2019, the hospital had been under attack for eight days, though she did not know it at the time. The devices that monitor fetal heartbeats had been affected, which would have otherwise warned staff that Kidd’s daughter was going to be born with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. The baby girl died nine months later.

The hospital denies wrongdoing. A Springhill executive emailed The Wall Street Journal, defending the hospital’s choice to stay open “because the patients needed us and we… concluded it was safe to do so.” It declined to name the hackers. “I need u to help me understand why I was not notified,” Kidd’s attending obstetrician texted a nurse manager after the birth, according to the suit. She wrote that she would have delivered the baby by caesarean section had she known about the monitor’s signals, adding, “This was preventable.”