The Department of Health is understood to be the victim of a suspected cyberattack, similar to the one that struck the Health Service Executive on Friday.
The Irish Times reports that the Department has shut down its systems.
The National Cyber Security Centre, along with gardaí and the Defence Forces, are understood to be investigating if the same criminal group is behind both attacks.
On Friday, Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform Ossian Smyth said the office of the Government chief information officer had identified issues at the Department of Health.
He said there may also have been a “serious breach” and that the department’s systems would be examined over the weekend, alongside the HSE systems, to assess the extent of any damage done.
HSE attack
Meanwhile on Sunday, the HSE remains in the process of contacting thousands of patients to reschedule appointments following Friday's attack on its IT systems.
Efforts are continuing to identify the extent of the attack, and if personal patient data has been stolen.
HSE chief operations officer, Anne O'Connor, told Newstalk radio that work has begun on rebuilding the health service’s systems.
“We have found that we do have some clean back-up data available to be able to rebuild our servers from, however, we have thousands upon thousands of virtual servers, so each server is going to have to be rebuilt and brought back up individually so it’s going to be a slow process,” she said.
“Our system has been very significantly compromised across the board.”
Thousands of patients are facing cancelled appointments and delays to health services, as the HSE works to bring its IT systems back online “in a safe manner one by one” following their precautionary shut down on Friday amid the cyberattack.
All outpatient and radiology services are impacted, although chemotherapy, dialysis services and the State's Covid-19 vaccination programme are continuing as normal.
Systems for GP and close-contact Covid-19 test referrals were among the services affected by the attack, although pre-arranged appointments are going ahead this weekend as planned.
No new daily Covid figures were released on Saturday due to the disruption caused by the attack.
