Lab work and scans are on hold in a small hospital town in northwestern Ontario, where ransomware has forced staff onto paper and closed the outpatient laboratory and diagnostic imaging department until further notice. Nipigon District Memorial Hospital says it has stood up incident response and business continuity plans while outside specialists, partner hospitals, and police work to contain the intrusion and restore systems safely.
Its leadership framed the job as three things: keeping care safe, containing the incident, and bringing systems back securely. The town’s mayor told local media that encrypted files may have held personal and personal health information, though investigators have not yet said whether anything was taken before encryption – a step common in modern extortion campaigns.
No restoration timeline has been given, and the hospital said it will notify anyone affected once the review establishes what was involved. Manual workflows slow registration, scheduling, diagnostics, and record access – the operational tax that lands hardest on small rural sites with thin IT benches.
The economics of these attacks stay brutal. Sector surveys put mean recovery costs near $1.02M, and roughly a third of affected healthcare providers paid a ransom in 2025. Comparitech’s tally for the year counted 636 intrusions across the wider healthcare sector.
