Hundreds of health care facilities were hit by ransomware last year amid pandemic

At the University of Vermont Medical Center in October, a cyberattack knocked out 5,000 computers on the hospital's IT network, disrupting everything from its financial systems to its radiology services and sleep studies. Patient care ground to a halt -- and the outage lasted for weeks.

"We really did not anticipate the scope or the impact the attack had on our system and how far-reaching it was," the organization's president, Dr. Stephen Leffler, told reporters at a December news conference. Staff at the facility had been trained to handle outages of 3 to 5 days at most. What hit UVM Medical Center was far worse: "Thirty days of downtime, going across all systems, was a true challenge for our staff -- it was a challenge for our patients." UVM Medical Center is one of many health care facilities — in the middle of a global pandemic, no less — to fall victim to ransomware, an increasingly common form of malicious software that criminals use to seize control of computers and often refuse to unlock until the victim pays a fee.