Cyber Attack on NHS

MRI scans typically take twenty to thirty minutes, having waited weeks for an appointment the poor man was probably less than impressed.

Must have been something very serious, too, to have been in an MRI machine for that long.

Just heard a poor chap on the radio. He was actually in the MRI scanner, and after about ten minutes it stopped because of the cyber attack. Poor chap went though all that worry leading up to it, and now he is none the wider, and will have to do it all again.

I bet there are thousands of similar cases, it beggers belief

"This is the largest such strike on the NHS but it is not the first. There’ll be an inquest this weekend among Britain’s cyber spooks. (GCHQ published an unfortunately timed limerick on social media yesterday, as the attack unfolded.)

The National Cyber Security Centre and NHS Digital must act urgently to address NHS cyber security – starting with replacing obsolete, unsupported systems (Windows XP!!) – before patient data is compromised."

From the i.

Anyone know what the limerick was?

This is not Brexit. IMO, this is to test a trojan horse, go worldwide and bring on collapse.

I have suggested that it was a fishing expedition to find out if they could attack windows XP, and that there are lots of other government systems run on the same windowsXP, including our nuclear arms.
Ostensibly it was to blackmail companies. The NHS is the third largest company in the world.
Hopefully the government did not cut the money to patch the nuclear arms system like it deliberately did for the NHS.

That's a good point Eloethan, countries like the US, that rely almost solely on private health insurance, will be crippled. Large corporations like FedEx have also been affected and so could, in turn, lose business; revenue, and then jobs.

Nobody seems to be asking what the purpose of this cyber attack might be - who might benefit from it.

The NHS is already on its knees and something like this - particularly if it recurs - could push it over the edge. Health insurance schemes in other countries that are government regulated/part financed could also be at risk of collapsing.

Not exactly an underspend then was it? But, considering that, when the Labour party left office in 2011, they left any successive government with a £60 billion bill to pick up due to the overspending on the NHS during their tenure. If the cyber attack (and that's what this OP is actually about, not the labour party or any other political party) had happened just in the UK, I could possibly agree that their had been some malfeasance, and therefore governmental culpability. But it wasn't. It is a global attack.

Can't do anything about the other 73 countries.
We can do something about ours. I thought Maybot kept telling us we were world leaders. We have spent over £11 billion updating IT systems in the NHS.

I thought I was joking about nuclear weapons.

www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a19061/britains-doomsday-subs-run-windows-xp/

Possibly the same as the other 73 affected countries will do?

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/13/nhs-computer-systems-insufficient-funding

What should we do to the government who knew it could happen and stopped the funding?

I second that harrigran

Sorry, meant to add that when I worked in the NHS we were constantly being warned about doing that.

www.theguardian.com/society/2017/may/13/jeremy-hunt-ignored-warning-signs-before-cyber-attack-hit-nhs

I blame Jeremy Hunt.

And that would make you happy, would it, shw? Seems a bit silly considering it's world-wide. You really can't blame remoaners for everything.

How can you stop people opening links in emails from people they don't know, thus having their computers (personal or work ones) infected with who knows what viruses?

... and then they wonder why patients don't want their health records online to share with drug companies etc.
Very occasionally hackers want to make a point - in this case it was (is?) downright dangerous - if ever caught, they should throw the book at them!

No doubt the remoaners will blame Brexit.

RAF, does it need to be microsoft?

More likely just business sense. The fifth biggest employer in the world changing OS?

BTW Micro$oft has just released a patch for XP, they must have some sort of conscience after all!

As others have noted, Micro$oft stopped supporting Windows XP three years ago, and gave the NHS plenty of warning. The NHS bought one year's further support of patches to update and protect from hacking, then left it up to NHS local organisations to upgrade, without giving them the funding to do this. If you have to meet A and E targets or get fined, you are not going to spend the money on IT.

The NHS has not bought sufficient bandwidth to run all systems at speed, so updates are switched off from automatically working so that an overload does not occur.

This attack has revealed how vulnerable every business is unless it keeps its servers up to date and patched. The fact that this particular bit of ransomware was built by the CIA to hack into computers and leave them open to further hacking, and then leaked and sold, show the sort of world we now have to cope with.

Energy suppliers. Nuclear energy.
Military. Nuclear weapons.
I hope they are more up to date than the NHS.

Oh dear Tories cut the renewal of the protection system in 2014.