Ransomware attack highlights importance of cyber Security

The ransomware that hit 47 NHS trusts this month highlights the importance of keeping IT systems patched and up to date.

In March, Microsoft issued a security patch for a weakness that has been exploited by the ransomware. The vulnerability in unpatched windows operating systems allowed the ransomware to self-spread across networks and was able to infect over 200,000 machines in over 150 countries causing major disruption worldwide.

The GP practice IT estates supported by Healthcare Computing came away from this recent attack relatively unscathed with less than 0.5% devices infected of the 20,000 workstation’s and servers that we support.

This unprecedented new level of threat has highlighted that we cannot be complacent and although we have some central control over windows and antivirus updates the challenge is successfully implementing any security patches before people can create viruses or malware.

To meet this challenge, we need practices and users to play their part leaving their pc’s on overnight on their allocated maintenance day of the week to allow us to install the windows updates in a managed way for you. If you are unsure of your practices maintenance day, please contact the service desk

“The recent attack showed the new level of threat that exists and we need to stay vigilant, being cautious about opening email attachments or accessing personal email accounts on their work computers. The attack also highlighted the value of the investment in the GP single domain infrastructure in enabling us to manage the patching at both desktop and server level and pinpoint machines that were not up to date and take action, without impacting on users. This outbreak did impact us in terms of a large influx of calls to our service desk, but thankfully few affected practices. We thank you all for your patience and support through this major incident”,  Richard Hiett, Head of Service Delivery