Boston Scientific has begun restoring shipping for the majority of products at its major distribution centers globally, roughly a week after the August 25 cyberattack that stopped manufacturing, order processing and shipping. Customers can submit orders electronically again, and the company said it will take time to work through the backlog.
Working with CrowdStrike and other outside firms, Boston Scientific said it has growing confidence the unauthorized access stayed inside select internal-facing IT infrastructure. It has not named a threat actor, described the attack method, or said whether data left the network. It declined to describe the state of manufacturing. Cardiac rhythm management took the visible hit: new remote monitoring activations for pacemakers, ICDs and insertable cardiac monitors were delayed, while implanted devices kept working.
For a device company, order entry and distribution are clinical systems. They decide whether a hospital has the catheter on the shelf this week. Any recovery plan that ranks them below corporate IT has the priority inverted, and a startup writing its first incident response plan should say so on the page.