Chaos Continues After Ransomware Hits UK ’ s NHS

The following is a guest article by Itay Bochner, Director of Malware Analysis at OPSWAT. Patients can’t get their medicine, psychiatrists can’t add reports to the system and provide their professional opinion in court, and only last week was the medical helpline number 111 restored. The manual logging of patient records is resulting in piles of paper documentation, which doctors are saying could take months to input into the online system once it’s restored. The ransomware attack on Advanced, one of the UK’s biggest software providers for its National Healthcare System, is turning into one of the biggest cyberattacks ever to happen in healthcare. Over 20 days have passed since the health services’ cloud provider was attacked by ransomware. Since then, providers and patients have had no access to medical records – causing chaos and broader societal impact.  Even more alarming, Advanced estimated it could take a few more weeks before they see a full restoration of services, leaving many questions about why recovery is taking so long and what could’ve been in place prior to the attack to reduce recovery time.  Why the Wait?  While we can only speculate at this time, the lengthy recovery time could either be due to Advanced’s production environment and the last backup not being up to date. Another possibility could be that the backup is also infected with the malware, and recovering it will not help, forcing them to go way back or build it again. ...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Healthcare IT Hospital - Health System Security and Privacy Advanced AWS CDR Center Hospital Sud Francilien Content Disarm and Reconstruction Cybersecurity Healthcare Cybersecurity Healthcare Malware Healthcare Ransomware Itay Boch Source Type: blogs