Stryker staff largely still at home

The majority of staff at medical device manufacturer Stryker have still not returned to work at the company’s Cork sites two weeks after it was hit by an international cyberattack.

The Cork Independent understands that Stryker’s sites on Model Farm Road and in Carrigtwohill are currently operating with a skeleton staff and are still attempting to recover from the attack.

Staff are being instructed on setting up internal systems from scratch, and many employees have not returned to the sites since being sent home or called off on 11 March.

The attack completely wiped internal systems, and it has been reported that what was left was wiped by Stryker themselves as a safety precaution.

As a result, on-site systems are being built from the ground up.

In a statement issued on Monday, Stryker said that it had identified “that the threat actor used a malicious file to run commands which allowed them to hide their activity while in our systems”.

While staff have not returned to work, it is understood that they have not been required to take additional holidays as of yet.

Stryker has said that it is working as quickly as possible to return to full operations.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Stryker said: “We are working closely with our manufacturing sites as operations continue to stabilise”.

“Manufacturing capability is ramping quickly as critical lines and plants are brought back online, prioritising patient needs,” they said.

Stryker employs over 4,100 people across 6 sites in Cork.

On 11 March, the company was hit by a cyberattack which wiped its systems in 79 countries, including personal devices of many employees who had company technology installed.

An Iranian-linked hacker group - Handala - claimed responsibility for the attack, and said it was a consequence of the US-Israeli attack on Iran.

They said that they had extracted over 50 terabytes of data - 50,000 gigabytes - and wiped over 200,000 systems worldwide.

The company’s share price has dropped as a result of the attack, falling by almost 15% since the beginning of March.