Waikato DHB Cyber Security Event update 28 May

Works continues at the Waikato DHB to ensure high levels of care and health services to patients. Further progress has been made to restore services with some significant steps expected in the next few days.

Waikato DHB hosted the Minister of Health and Minister responsible for the GCSB, Hon. Andrew Little, who met with staff and DHB leadership, as well as attending a meeting of the incident response team.

The COVID-19 test and trace system operated by Waikato DHB has been unaffected by the outage and we will be able to cope as usual, if there is a surge in community testing as a result of the Melbourne outbreak.

The vaccination programme has continued with limited interruption. At this time, we remain 10% ahead of our planned schedule.

We are looking forward to making some significant steps forward in restoration of our IT services this weekend.

Our IT team will be installing staff devices which will help immensely with our internal and external communications, and there is great progress being made toward standing up our first system, towards the end of next week.

We are currently aware that a limited amount of patient and staff data may have been impacted in the incident and we are taking urgent steps to review the impacted data and we will be in direct contact with any affected individuals.

We are also working alongside specialist legal privacy experts and the Privacy Commissioner to ensure we meet all our obligations to notify both patients and staff whose data may have been affected.

In parallel with our own review the data is currently being analysed with support from Cyber security experts, NZ Police and other government agencies. We are prioritising this work and we expect to be able to confirm and begin notifying any affected individuals next week.

A dedicated helpline is available 24/7 on 0800 561 234 for questions or concerns. 11 calls were received yesterday. These were all privacy related.

iDCare can be contacted on 0800 121 068 for free support on how to protect personal information.

The next updates for the public will be on Saturday 29 May and Sunday 30 May. These will be a short, written update with no planned press conferences