Cyberattack on Alliance Healthcare Espana disrupts Spanish medicine distribution

Alliance Healthcare Espana, the Spanish arm of the pharmaceutical wholesaler Alliance Healthcare, was hit by a cyberattack that began on Friday 17 March 2023 and left large parts of its business unusable. The company's servers were blocked, taking down its website, its billing systems and the online platform pharmacists use to place orders.

Spain's national cybersecurity institute, INCIBE, reported that the disruption also reached services the company provides to pharmaceutical laboratories and to clinical trials. Alliance Healthcare described the event publicly as an interruption of its IT system and said it was working quickly to resolve it.

The company is Spain's fourth largest wholesale distributor of medicines, and the effects were felt most sharply in Catalonia, where it holds roughly a quarter of the market. Pharmacies there reported delayed and cancelled deliveries. Industry representatives said patients were largely shielded because most pharmacies order from more than one wholesaler, and rival distributors absorbed the extra demand.

Personal health data was not understood to be involved. Wholesalers of this kind handle commercial records such as orders and invoices rather than patient files. No group publicly claimed responsibility and the company did not confirm whether ransomware was used. The disruption was still unresolved when it was first reported in the Spanish and Catalan press on 22 and 23 March 2023, roughly five days after it started.