The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics websites have been down since this afternoon after a suspected cyberattack. 

Affected websites included the UI Hospitals and Clinics, UI Stead Family Children’s Hospital, and Carver College of Medicine. A pro-Russian group, KillNet, is responsible for the attack.  

In an email statement to The Daily Iowan, UIHC spokesperson Laura Shoemaker wrote that UI Health Care is aware of the attack and is investigating the issue. 

“Our information technology (IT) team continues to investigate the issue,” she wrote. “These websites do not contain patient data or information. Patient care is not affected by these outages.”

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center issued a warning Monday that the Russian hacktivist group was targeting health care facilities across the country. 

“KillNet has previously targeted, or threatened to target, organizations in the health care and public health (HPH) sector,” according to the report. 

Cybersecurity company BetterCyber also tweeted earlier that KillNet had been targeting health care facilities across all 50 states, and included a list of affected websites that included UIHC.

The government group said in its warning that the pro-Russian hacking group KillNet was responsible for the attack. 

A report from the center on Dec. 22, 2022, described KillNet as “a pro-Russian hacktivist group, active since at least January 2022, and known for its DDoS campaigns against countries supporting Ukraine.”

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) is an attack on a website by overwhelming it with fake traffic.