Cyber resiliency analyst Jonathon Guthrie unspools 150 feet of ethernet cable across a UC San Diego campus lawn toward undergraduate student Almog Bar-Yossef. They hook the cable up to a metal antenna that receives a satellite internet connection.
The cable extends down a staircase into the UC San Diego School of Medicine Simulation Training Center, where it will be connected to a hub that generates a private wireless 5G cellular network. Here, physicians Jeff Tully and Christian Dameff, join computer scientists, engineers and students as they unload multiple laptops, a server, patient monitors and clinical equipment from giant black hard cases. The team is preparing to run a test deployment of Project CRASHCART.
“Project CRASHCART is a hospital IT system in a box,” said Tully, a clinical associate professor of anesthesiology at the School of Medicine, who co-directs the UC San Diego Center for Healthcare Cybersecurity together with Dameff, an associate professor of emergency medicine, biomedical informatics and computer science. The mobile backup computing system — which fills most of a nine-foot cargo van — is designed to restore essential digital tools, such as patient records, communication networks and clinical workflows to a 20-bed emergency department at a small hospital in the wake of a malicious cyberattack.
“We’re seeing more and more cyberattacks on critical hospital infrastructure,” said Dameff.
As clinicians, Tully and Dameff have witnessed firsthand how cyberattacks can disrupt patient care and compromise safety.
“We take care of patients — often very sick patients — every day in the hospital, and we rely on dozens of tools and technologies connected to the internet,” said Tully. Everything, from ambulance communications systems and electronic health records (EHRs) to imaging equipment and laboratory systems, is at risk. “Ransomware and other attacks on national critical health care infrastructure are a serious patient safety problem. They can disrupt the care of patients with time-sensitive medical conditions, such as stroke, heart attack or sepsis, and lead to worse outcomes.”
That’s where Project CRASHCART comes in. It can be deployed to ensure that essential networked technologies are available during a cyberattack on a hospital, significantly reducing hospital downtime and potentially saving lives.
Source: UC San Diego Today, 19 August 2026
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