Computer Virus Attack Forces Hospitals To Cancel Operations, Shut Down Systems (zdnet.com)

A hospital system in the United Kingdom has canceled all planned operations and diverted major trauma cases to neighboring facilities citing a computer virus outbreak. From a report on ZDNet: The Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust says a "major incident" has been caused by a "computer virus" which infected its electronic systems on Sunday. As a result of the attack, the hospital has taken the decision to shut down the majority of its computer networks in order to combat the virus. "A virus infected our electronic systems [on Sunday] and we have taken the decision, following expert advice, to shut down the majority of our systems so we can isolate and destroy it," said Dr Karen Dunderdale, the trust's deputy chief executive. The use of a shared IT system also means the United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust has been taken offline as staff attempt to combat the attack. As a result of the attack, all outpatient appointments and diagnostic procedures that were set to take place at the infected hospitals on Monday and Tuesday have been canceled, while medical emergencies involving major trauma and women in high-risk labor are being diverted to neighboring hospitals.

Comments

Major incident caused by a "computer virus"

[khz6955]

What was the name of this "computer virus" and what was the name of the Operating System platform?

Re:Major incident caused by a "computer virus"

[leathered]

From what I've heard it's a ransomware variant. The NHS is virtually all-Microsoft.

I currently work in IT for an NHS trust. We've had several incidents involving ransomware encrypting files on shares but they've been contained and easily dealt with because 1) we have a highly granular file structure, users only have write access to shares and folders that is absolutely necessary and access is regularly audited. 2) a snapshotting file system which makes it a lot easier to recover files than restoring from tape. 3) by identifying the ownership of the encrypted files we can nail the culprit quickly and remove their access immediately to prevent further damage.

Anti Virus has proven to be useless, the people who write this stuff are always one step ahead of the AV vendors.

Re:Maybe they shouldn't be using the largest...

[guruevi]

I do work in the business, we run my department completely on Mac and Linux, not only that but we have almost no proprietary software. All of our core software is open source with only a few things like certain visualization software that isn't.

The problem isn't choice, the problem is nobody cares that your hospital is a billion dollars over budget, government and insurance will pay for it. Another symptom is the "head count problem", a CIO is successful if it can reduce the amount of people working for it and as such it's liability.

The reason everything is shifting to being outsourced is liability, if a contractor or a vendor screws up, the hospital doesn't have to notify anyone and the contracting company (a glorified shell company) in worst case can just change it's name or cease operations, even better if your local laws don't apply to the contractor. Either way, nobody is held responsible or embarrassed.

Computer virus? Or Windows virus?

[troublemaker_23]

Why does ZDNet always hide the fact that Windows is the operating system involved when viruses, worms, malware, scumware, ransomware etc are involved?

Re:Maybe they shouldn't be using the largest...

[Anonymous Coward]

Medical imaging uses a networking standard called Dicom. Some equipment are running Windows, other Linux, some review stations Mac Os, etc...