Do you know how much loss did the WannaCry Ransomware Attack cause to UK’s NHS? The news is out that the national healthcare provider lost almost £92 million and had to cancel almost 19,000 appointments due to the computer network disruption caused by the malware in May’17.
The loss estimate of WannaCry Cyber Attack was done by the Department of Health (DoH) in this year and confirmed that a third of hospital trusts and 8 percent of GP practices were hit by Cyber Attack.
Financial stats released by the hospital yesterday stated that the healthcare service provider had to reportedly cancel a large number of appointments between May 12th and May 19th causing a monetary loss of NHS £20 million. Then it required £72 m to upgrade its IT systems after cleaning up the malware mess from its servers.
To those who aren’t aware of the cyber attack on NHS, here’s a gist of what happened to the healthcare provider- On May 12th, 2017 a group of hackers suspected to have funded by a nation launched a WannaCry Ransomware attack on the servers of NHS Trust of England. Almost 80 hospitals in the network were impacted and 595 GP practices were affected causing a disruption to a total of 250,000 computers across 150 countries.
United States Intelligence teams later discovered that the attack was launched by a hackers group called Lazarus from North Korea. Though the accused nation has denied all these claims put forward by US intelligence, the law enforcement authorities from UK and UK claim that they have enough evidence to prove Kim Jong Un led the nation as the culprit.
DoH issued a report that NHS systems were cyber attacked with ransomware as they were using the obsolete and extinct Windows XP operating systems on most of their workstations.
In March 2018, UK Prime Minister Theresa May said in a public interview that the government has and will continue to invest in the upgrade of cybersecurity and infrastructure of all government and private entities in order to ensure that they are well defended from all the cyber adversaries of Britain.
As a part of this initiative, a £150 m investment was announced to upgrade the NHS technology systems over the next three years. This includes upgrading all systems running on the 17-year old Windows XP to Microsoft Windows 10.
