Transcript of Hospitals at risk for cyber attacks

A widespread IT outage is affecting major companies around the world. This outage has been wreaking havoc on hospitals.

This was probably the biggest event that I've seen of this magnitude in my career.

For John Donahue, Vice President of Corporate Information Services at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia. Hospitals? That's going to take weeks to recover from that. July 19th was a day he'll never forget.

I got the first phone call about 1:30 in the morning on Friday, and my first thought, this can't be true. This is some prank. From airports to hospitals, a software update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike crashed computer systems around the globe.

Initially, this looked like a cyber attack. It did. Though it wasn't a cyber attack, for many hospitals, it was their first time experiencing what one could be like.

It required a physical touch in every file server and every device, close to 60,000 devices in total.

Doctors and nurses were thrown into new territory. We couldn't access anything on the computers. Nurses like Melissa Jewe resorting to pen and paper to write down patient information. The crowdstrike incident forced many medical procedures here at Penn Medicine to come to a complete standstill, but some potentially life-saving treatments couldn't wait. Dr. Allison Lauren was scheduled to conduct a bone marrow harvest that day. In one word, what was that day like for you? Scary. Ultimately, pulling it off paper records, cell phones, and trust in her team. Kevin Mahoney, CEO of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, says this was a wake-up call.

The healthcare system is not prepared for these enormous cyberattacks.

In 2023, country. The FBI says 249 ransomware attacks targeted healthcare institutions across the country. And earlier this year, Ascension, one of the nation's largest healthcare systems, made headlines after they experienced a cyber attack.

It's being demonstrated here.

Penn Medicine now finding ways to protect themselves from potential attacks.

What we have here is a threat map, and this shows us globally what's happening from a cyber perspective. This map is another cyber attack map that we use to spot trends. It's focused on spam volume and malware volume.

Is this something you use daily?

Our cyber team would use this daily.

Getting ready now to prevent a catastrophe in the future. Valarie Castro, NBC News, Philadelphia. Thanks for watching. Stay updated Stay updated about breaking news and top stories on the NBC News app or follow us on social media.