1.) NHS of Cumbria located in North West England has disclosed recently that it has been targeted by more than 150 cyber attacks in the last 5 years. A report from BBC has confirmed the news that the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust, which runs hospitals in Barrow, Kendal, Morecambe, and Lancaster was mostly impacted by the cyber incident. And added that the trust spent £29,600 in 2017 to deal with the impact of cyber attacks.
Lee Coward, the head of Information Technology wing of NHS said that the health care services provider has witnessed higher volumes of identified cyber attacks than other firms in recent years. But at the same time, he reasserted that the issue was smartly dealt with the help of NCSC, a cybersecurity wing of GCHQ.
2.) In another news related to cyber incidents happening in the UK, Kaspersky Lab in its latest report has revealed that almost 30 million cyber crimes were targeted at the UK populace in last quarter of 2018, with the majority of them being apportioned via web browsers.
The security report of Russia based anti-virus provider says that the most common type of attack were worms and file viruses delivered by exploiting vulnerabilities in browsers and extensions or plugins. Social engineering attacks were another delivery methods used by cyber crooks to set up attacks.
Researchers of the Eugene Kaspersky led firm say that more than 17.5 million customers of the multinational cybersecurity firm were affected by local threats and over 11.2 million of the total cyber threats were caused by computer server OS vulnerabilities in the last quarter of 2018.
The malware was also delivered by cyber crooks in the said time period and that too not by connected attacks, but by USB drives, CDs and DVDs.
Kaspersky suggests that businesses in the UK should be more cautious about threats in the current year as they are predicted to be launched in a more sophisticated manner resulting in more devastation and money loss.
3.) Coming to the third news related to cyber attacks in the UK, Oxford University has reportedly suspended any further financial assistance to its research projects from Chinese Company Huawei amid increasing data security concerns.
Last week, the educational institute sent an email to all its computer science students which says that the college committee has decided to block and review all donations made by Huawei till next 6 months or till the date a further analysis is conducted.
However, those projects which already have received donations, or are in progress will not be impacted by the latest decision. Also if the CSC students are in contact with anyone from the firm due to project constraints are open to maintain their cordial relationship until and unless they do no harm to the integrity of the projects by disclosing confidential or proprietary info to the subjects of the Chinese firm.
