Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 23 June 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

Update on the Cyberattack, Covid-19 Vaccination Roll-out and Covid-19 Restrictions in Maternity Hospitals: Health Service Executive

Mr. Paul Reid:

I will answer that and my colleague, Mr. Thompson, may want to add to it. The 75% figure referenced by Deputy Crowe relates to the servers which have been restored. He is correct in that they would include the data on those and 70% of the end-user laptops have been decrypted. There is no doubt data were impacted throughout this whole process and across a range of our networks, which we have had to restore to the levels they were at.

We did have our backup data which we were able to restore in terms of further protection. With regard to data which were extracted, which I touched on earlier on with one of the Deputies, we have one known incident of that in which records were published through an online publication. Following a High Court order, we secured the recovery of those data. The agency which published them redacted the data. When we recovered the data, we were able to get the whole set of data. There were 520 patient records in that, along with some other contractual corporate documents we had relating to contracts. They have been recovered. We feel we have secured the data, but we can never be certain if any of it is extracted.