CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A company in charge of keeping patients' records safe and confidential is back online after dealing with a cyberattack.
The medical records of more than 7 million Americans were held hostage by ransomware.
There are reports that practices in North Carolina have been affected.
The latest cybercrime attacked a company called Allscripts, headquartered in Chicago, which has offices in Raleigh and Charlotte.
Allscripts calls itself a leader in health technology, storing everything from scheduling to test results to medications. According to AllScripts’ website, it stores medical records for 45,000 physician practices across the country.
Allscripts statement to WSOC-TV:
"We recognize this has been disruptive for our clients and are working around the clock to safely and securely return service to all affected clients. Service to the majority of our impacted clients has now been restored, and we continue to work with the remaining clients to bring them back online as quickly as possible.
"Upon discovering the ransomware attack, we immediately notified the FBI and have been providing information to assist with their investigation. While access to a subset of our products was disrupted for roughly 1,500 of our clients, there is no evidence that any data was removed from our systems."
The cyberattack forced doctors to temporarily close their offices and turn thousands of patients away because they couldn't access information to properly care for them.
A practice in Gastonia told Channel 9 it dealt with this problem for over a week, and it was losing money. The practice said its systems came back on Friday. But it wasn't able to process charges during the outage so it's worried about a delay in money coming in.
Channel 9 reached out to Novant Health officials and asked if they use scripts. They said they don't use the company. We also asked Carolinas Healthcare System if it uses Allscripts but officials there are still working on a response.
Allscripts officials said they don't believe hackers got access to patient information.
If you have been impacted by the breach, reach out to our Action 9 team at action9@wsoc-tv.com
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