Update: British NHS Confirms A Damaging Software Attack
A cyber attack has hit systems used by the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), affecting services across all four of the UK’s nations. The attack targeted the system used to refer patients for care, including ambulances being dispatched. The incident disrupted NHS 111, the helpline for medical advice, along with systems used to dispatch ambulances, make out-of-hours appointments and issue emergency prescriptions.
It is now emerging that the attack has also affected Adastra, the clinical patient management software supplied to the NHS by the healthcare software & services firm, Advanced, and this aspect of the attack is leaving many clinical services disrupted, including access to confidential patient notes.
This incident is clearly more extensive than first thought to be and some patient information and data will not be available online for weeks
People seeking medical help via these service are being warned of delays due to a “major” computer system outage caused by the attack. It affected the phone service and referrals to out-of-hours GPs. NHS staff across the UK have been left using pens and paper after the attack and staff have been told that the loss of access to online services could continue for as long as three weeks, raising safety issues for urgent cases.
The origins of this attack are unknown at present, however similar large scale attacks in Ireland, New Zealand, Israel and the US raise concerns over criminal intent to extort ransom to restore services, or even the malicious actions hostile nation-state hackers.
The National Crime Agency said it was "aware of a cyber incident" and was working with Advanced. "A security issue was identified yesterday, which resulted in loss of service," said Advanced COO Simon Short. "We can confirm that the incident is related to a cyber attack and as a precaution, we immediately isolated all our health and care environments. Early intervention from our Incident Response Team contained this issue to a small number of servers representing 2% of our Health & Care infrastructure."
Family doctors in London were warned by NHS England they could see an increased number of patients sent to them by NHS 111 due to the severe technical issue. It said a letter to GPs in the capital stated the problem was affecting the electronic referral process for patients.
It’s feared disruption could drive patients to overstretched accident and emergency departments and this was the case last week when the Isle of Wight NHS Trust declared a critical incident in response to ‘sustained pressure’ on its A&E services.
"The ongoing outage is significant and has been far reaching, impacting each of the four nations in the UK." an NHS England spokesman said. “There is currently minimal disruption and the NHS will continue to monitor the situation as it works with Advanced to resolve their software system as quickly as possible, tried and tested contingency plans are in place for local areas who use this service.”
Deryck Mitchelson, Field CISO at Check Point, and former NHS Scotland CISO, commented: “Healthcare now has such a dependency on digital technology from electronic health records, scheduling and admissions to scanners, x-rays, and laboratories, that an outage can have a direct impact on the life and death of patients. As the NHS recovers from the Covid-19 emergency footing, it is now at its most vulnerable to cyber attack."
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