UK Hospitals Fall Victim to Ransomware Attack

Hospitals across the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland shut downward their IT systems on Friday as they struggled to defend against a cyber attack that froze many computers and demanded ransom payments to unlock them.

SecurityWatch 16 organizations affiliated with Britain'due south National Health Service report being affected, with 1 NHS IT worker telling the Guardian that the affected systems represent "the largest outage of this nature I've seen in the six years I've been employed with the NHS."

In a statement, the NHS said that its early on investigations attributed the attack to a strain of malware known equally the "Wanna Decryptor," a ransomware program that infects computers via a trojan virus and encrypts information stored on the local deejay drive. No patient data was compromised, co-ordinate to the NHS, which said that the attack appeared to target victims exterior the healthcare industry also.

Reports of healthcare IT system outages flooded Twitter and other social media sites on Fri afternoon. I healthcare worker tweeted a moving picture of a computer screen with a pop-up window from the Wanna Decryptor program that read "Oops, your files have been encrypted!" and included a instructions on how to send a $300 bribe payment.

#nhscyberattack picture.twitter.com/SovgQejl3X
— gigi.h (@fendifille) May 12, 2022

Affected hospitals and other NHS facilities from London to Liverpool cancelled routine patient appointments and diverted ambulances to other nearby facilities that weren't affected, according to the Guardian. Britain'due south National Cyber Security Heart said it was aware of the attack and investigating. At that place were no firsthand reports of victims in the US.

Healthcare facilities are an bonny target for ransomware attacks because their computer systems have sensitive data and many have shown a willingness to pay the ransoms rather than spend extended amounts of fourth dimension trying to unlock the information themselves. There are more than 20 ransomware-related data loss incidents per twenty-four hour period in the healthcare sector, according to Intel Security.

NHS hospitals in detail are frequent targets. A ransomware attack concluding November took a hospital in the eastern English county of Lincolnshire offline for several days. In the US, meanwhile, hospitals in California and Kentucky paid attackers tens of thousands of dollars last year to free their computers from ransomware.