Summit Pacific Medical Center in Elma undergoes about 200,000 cyber attacks a year.

During a presentation to the Grays Harbor County Hospital District No. 1 Board of Directors, Roderick White, the director of health information technology and systems, said over the past seven days that the hospital had 3,750 “log-in failure” events, the vast majority of which came from overseas — “China, Middle East, South America, Ukraine,” he said.

He mentioned phishing and spoofing attacks as common attempts to access the system that had been thwarted.

White said two recent ransomware attacks had been successful locking up files for two users.

“I think it was WannaCry that got our former marketing director,” he said after the presentation to the board, referencing the common ransomware software. “Her password was compromised and that allowed them to encrypt the files she had write-access to.”

White and the SPMC tech team were aware of the attack before the user could get to their offices to say she did not have access to files.

“First off, we took the machine off the network, you want to limit the spread of the attack,” White said. They then restored files from prior to the attack. That user lost only about an hour’s worth of work.

White said that at no time during the ransomware attacks was the public’s information in jeopardy of being lost.

“In the sense of ransomware, you’re not spilling data out, they just lock files up so you can’t access them,” he said.

White stressed to the board the process by which SPMC files are protected. The Summit systems are on servers in Spokane on a different domain and network that users in Elma don’t has access to, he said. Files worked on in Elma are backed up every five minutes in Spokane. In the case of an attack, files are recovered from before the attack, eliminating the threat.

Strategic plan

The board also gave CEO Josh Martin reassurances that he was moving on the right track in developing a 2020 strategic plan for SPMC.

“Really focusing on stewardship needs to be a critical focus of next year,” Martin said, “given we’ve taken on some significant debt with the Wellness Center, really focusing on being good stewards of our resources fiscally.”

Other goals include:

• Developing purposeful partnerships with shared value and goals.

• Providing quality across service lines.

“And it’s essential to continue to focus on our people,” he said, calling them the most important asset of the corporation.

November meeting

The board decided the November meeting would be at 2 p.m. Nov. 22 at the SPMC. The previous meeting time would have fallen on Thanksgiving.