Barts Health IT still down four days after cyber-attack

Digital Health is reporting that Barts Health NHS Trust has not fully restored IT systems four days after detecting a cyber-attack.

Barts Health NHS Trust told staff on Friday morning that it had shut down some of its IT systems to deal with “ransomware virus attack issues”…

The trust later clarified that the attack was not ransomware but an unspecified “IT attack” that engineers were still trying to resolve on Monday morning…

It also comes against a backdrop of a rising cyber-security threat for the NHS, with concerns that many trusts still rely on legacy IT systems, such as Windows XP, that are vulnerable to attack…

On Thursday, Digital Health News reported that Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s new information technology strategy identified cyber threats as the biggest digital risk it faced.

“The infection can come from anywhere, sometimes even a trusted source, and therefore we need to be extra vigilant as a cyber-attack could be a case of life or death.”…

Pete Banham, a cyber resilience expert at cyber security company Mimecast, said the Barts Health attack “reads like a textbook example”.

“Without proper technical controls, it only takes one person to open a malicious email attachment and the attacker is in.”

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