Summary
UK’s NHS suffered from a ransomware attack just this June, caught it completely off guard and caused its hospitals in London, King’s College Hospital, Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital, among others, to suffer from major service breakdown. The attack mainly aimed at the service provider for its blood testing IT services, Synnovis, and thousands of blood tests each day could not be performed because of this. As a result, more than 10,000 blood samples are discarded because they are not suitable for testing, and 200 operations were cancelled, some of which involved critical conditions.
Analysis
This attack exposed the weaknesses in one of the most critical IT systems in the UK NHS. This showed that attacks are becoming highly dangerous and getting its target based on geopolitical factors, since it’s believed that the attack was carried out by a Russian hacker group. The advancements in cryptocurrencies have caused these type of attacks to becoming more widespread, and service providers should realize this and use appropriate defending methods to prevent their system from being hijacked.
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