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Dis-Chem prescription service outage after cyber attack

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb's news editor.
Johannesburg, 11 May 2022

Pharmacy retail giant Dis-Chem has notified customers that prescription services will suffer downtime for two hours today.

The announcement comes after the company notified its clients of a cyber incident.

In an SMS to customers today, the company says: “Please note there will be scheduled downtime 11 May 2022 between 20H00 and 22H00, which will affect prescription services. We apologise for the inconvenience caused.”

While the SMS message does not link the “scheduled downtime” to the cyber incident reported today, the firm has become the latest South African organisation to fall victim to a cyber attack.

According to Dis-Chem, a cyber incident emanating from its third-party service provider resulted in data of over 3.6 million South Africans being compromised.

In a notification in accordance with the country’s data privacy law, the Protection of Personal Information Act, Dis-Chem says: “It was brought to our attention on 1 May 2022 that an unauthorised party had managed to gain access to the contents of the database.”

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