Cyber attack on British NHS

[Dan1980]

There's been an cyber attack on the British NHS computers. Hopefully no patient data has been stolen.

[CellarDweller]

apparently it's spreading around the world to different organizations.

I'm in the banking industry, and we were emailed about this matter, and told not to open any suspicious emails.

[LONDONER]

[SIZE="4"]Cyber crime is apparently becoming the fastest growing crime. I can well believe it. I have posted on another forum how I have managed to stop SPAM e-mails almost 100% but SCAM e-mails are a different matter. Over the last two weeks I have been bombarded by type 419 SCAMS. In the last eight days I have received more than thirty, all of them claiming that I am due for millions of dollars. Either I have inherited them or that I have won a lottery or that they are in a sealed box waiting my collecting at some American airport or that a dying widow wants me to use her late husband's fortune for religious or charitable purposes.

If any of them were true then I think that Warren Buffet would be looking at me with envy! All of these SCAM have fortunately been filtered in to my SCAM/SPAM inbox and I have duly reported them to the appropriate domain/ISP but still they keep coming. I wonder what use there is in reporting them.

Outlook used to reply saying that action had been taken. Gmail and Yahoo just send an automated "thank you" but the same SCAM e-mails keep appearing. Not much else I can do.

All this is small change compared to what is happening to the NHS and other similar organisations in more than 100 countries around the world. It was reported on the news this morning that one hospital in the USA had paid a ransom of $17,000 to be able to regain access to its files.

It's unlikely that I as a lone individual would be attacked in such a matter but all the same I have hurried to back up my data on to an external hard disc. One of the morals of this is never, ever open a link in an e-mail that does not come from someone about whom you are not 100% sure.
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[matty7]

it wasn't a specific attack on the NHS , its just they were very vulnerable because they were running windows XP and Microsoft stopped supporting it a good while ago - the NHS actually paid them 5 million for just one more year support , unfortunately the government does not have/will not spend to update its systems