A number of major hospitals in London, including King's College Hospital and Guy's and St Thomas', have been hit by a cyber attack. Hackers managed to hold pathology systems hostage preventing certain care from being carried out. This is reported by several British newspapers including the Guardian.
All of the affected hospitals were working with a Synnovis pathology system. It seems that the hackers managed to install software on Synnovis' servers. This allowed them to encrypt the systems. They then asked for a ransom to restore these servers. It is not known if any were paid.
In addition to the hospitals, there were also problems at some GP practices in London that work with the system.
A spokesperson for Synnovis says they have put IT specialists on the case to find out exactly what happened. The NHS(National Health Service) has said it is currently working with the National Cyber Security Centre to find out what happened and where it went wrong.
The hospitals report that the cyber attack caused major problems. For example, the attack made it difficult to perform blood transfusions and see test results. Some appointments had to be rescheduled and some patients were referred to other hospitals.
However, the hospitals do indicate that critical care and emergency rooms continued as usual.
Hospitals and other healthcare facilities are increasingly being targeted by hackers. Because of the enormous consequences a healthcare hack can have, it is extra important to properly secure these systems. Although in this case there does not appear to have been a major impact on patients, the fear image of such an attack is, of course, that it can have life-threatening consequences.
Precisely to prevent patients from being affected by a hack, hospitals will be more willing to pay in the event of a ransomware attack.
