A few days ago, the IT Managed Services provider ‘Advanced’ suffered a ransomware attack that almost crippled the entire emergency network of NHS UK to the core. To keep going, the healthcare services provider resorted to the pen and paper services in order to bring the situation under control.
But because of the disruption of the network of NHS 111, patient check-ins, medical notes and emergency services such as ambulance came to a severe halt, as many of such services were being managed with pen & paper.
Staff are finding it difficult to manually manage the services because of which piles of papers and patient files are seen being dumped into the room.
The attack that took place on August 4th of this year will leave ‘Advanced’ paralyzed for a few more months and if the situation continues staff estimate that the administration officials will need at-least a 5000-10,000 square feet space to secure patient data. And then a few of the data entry staff to digitize the whole info.
NOTE 1- NHS offers medical services to over 250,000 patients across 1220 hospitals and has reported the incident to NCSC and ICO.
NOTE 2-Advanced is into IT services and provides support to about 42 acute healthcare service providers. It has taken the incident seriously and has hired forensic experts to probe down the incident. The group behind the incident is yet to be probed, and it is unclear whether the threat actors have stolen any data before encrypting the servers.
