Thousands of dental offices are on their fifth day of closing their doors to patients. Yesterday, this news finally made nation news coverage from many IT related news websites.
On Sunday August 25th, two Wisconsin companies that provide an online service to dentists' offices, Percsoft and the Digital Dental Record, told their customers that the software they use to connect to individual offices had been infected with ransomware Monday morning. In periodic updates, they say they are working on a case-by-case basis. Every office is totally shut down and many offices have totally lost their data forever.
Below are direct comments on Digital Dental Record’s facebook page from dental practice owners:
“More and more lost hours and revenue with patients getting more and more frustrated. Very embarrassing for all of us. STILL no decryption running on our server. This will make for a fun holiday weekend of catch up if our system gets restored.” – Dr. North Shore
“I hope you understand that our offices are not seeing patients and therefore generating no income which trickles down to our employees. We are having issues seeing patients and keeping our people working. This is extremely frustrating.” – Dr. Karen Sandoval
“I gotta say the longer this goes the more pissed off I am getting. We get cryptic responses once in a blue moon. We can get into some computers but not all. We cannot get xrays at all. Cannot get into Quickbooks at all.” – Dr. Paul Levine
" We are still down and have no idea when you can get us back up. Do we have to reschedule tomorrow also? " – Dr. Gerald Middleton
A few practices have recovered with hundreds who will face days more of turning away patients.