The news closely follows an FBI warning that the number of sophisticated attacks on businesses and state and local governments is continuing to climb.

Ransomware attacks work by encrypting entire file systems, with attackers demanding ransom payments (typically in cryptocurrency) to provide the correct decryption key. In the last few years, targeted ransomware attacks on businesses demanding big payouts have become one of the highest-profile cybersecurity issues in the country. In the Alabama incident, medical staff at hospitals in Tuscaloosa, Northport, and Fayette were forced to switch to a manual paper system to track patient data while their systems were down. All three hospitals said they would divert "all but the most critical new patients" to other area health care centers for the duration of the outage.