UMass Memorial Health Security Incident

An article from The Kronos outage disrupted one employer's payroll for more than a month. Here's how it moved forward. UMass Memorial Health had to quickly improvise a way to run payroll for more than 16,000 employees without hours-worked data, CFO Sergio Melgar told HR Dive. Published March 21, 2022 Ryan Golden Senior Reporter post share post print email license " UMass Memorial Medical Center " by Sean is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0 In the midst of the late December holiday rush, employers were facing a thin talent market complicated by pandemic-driven uncertainty. Then, adding insult to injury, timekeeping and payroll went down for many. On Saturday, Dec. 11, 2021, UKG, the parent company of workforce management platform Kronos, notified clients using its Kronos Private Cloud product of a "ransomware incident." As a result of the attack, employers across a swath of industries experienced a weekslong outage affecting both timekeeping and payroll. For UMass Memorial Health, one of the largest health systems in Massachusetts, the outage had an immediate impact. For more than a month, the organization relied on backup timekeeping methods. It was not un til Jan. 27, 2022, t hat UMass resumed using Kronos as the timekeeping source for its payroll, and even then, the organization noted discrepancies. "The first what I would call 'clean' payroll would have been the Feb. 3 payroll," said Sergio Melgar, executive vice president and chief financial officer of the health system. In an interview, Melgar provided HR Dive a detailed timeline of events, from the moment UMass recognized Kronos' services went down, to his communication with executives and Kronos representatives, to the eventual restoration of services. He also discussed UMass' future plans to respond to similar incidents and the lessons learned from what Melgar said he described to UMass executives as "the most serious problem we have ever faced." 'Hopefully it would be up in short order' Melgar's team first...

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