A Million British Medical Patient Records Hacked

Uploaded on 2023-07-18 in TECHNOLOGY--Hackers, FREE TO VIEW, BUSINESS-Services-Health & Welfare

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has disclosed the personal information and other details on over a million patients have been compromised, senior health chiefs have been warned.

This follows a recent ransomware attack on the University of Manchester (UoM) which affected an NHS patient data set that holds information on 1.1 million patients across 200 hospitals.

Among the details potentially exposed are NHS numbers and the first three letters of patients’ postcodes.

The information, which includes records of major trauma patients across the country and people treated after terror attacks, was gathered by the university for research purposes. In its warning to health officials, the university said it did not know how many patients were affected or whether names had also been hacked. The university said that some systems were affected or were running slower than normal. The student accommodation system, for instance, was not available as of 23 June.

The data that had been collected by the hacker includes name and contact details, next of kin information, ID numbers, study details, ethnicity, and even disability codes in some cases. An NHS document has shown that the university’s back-up servers were accessed, but it is not known who was behind the attack.

As a result of the incident, NHS chiefs were warned by UoM that there is “potential for NHS data to be made available in the public domain” and the data set has since been closed. Some patients will not know they are on the database, launched in 2012, as they did not need to give consent to be recorded on it.

In an unrelated incident on August 5 last year, a separate hack led to the outage of software used to access patient data across NHS 111, a dozen mental health trusts, community hospitals and out-of-hours GP services. The outage lasted weeks and has caused sever safety problems such as patients being prescribed the wrong dose of medication and clinicians being unable to properly assess mentally unwell patients.

Healthcare is the riskiest industry and this is partly due to the level of connectivity needed for medical services, where sensitive data moves from medical devices and workstations to internal servers, sometimes to external services and then to patients or doctors.

Head of Security Research at Forescout, Daniel Dos Santos, commented “Besides the data risks, healthcare organisations need to pay attention to the diversity of devices within their environment. Whether it’s an IT, IoT, OT or IoMT device – neglecting its specific needs can serve as an entry point for attackers. Inventorying, assessing the risk and ensuring compliance of these devices are important first steps to guarantee their security, which can then be followed by monitoring the network to detect and respond to threats in real time.”

Between 2022 and 2023, the global healthcare sector saw over 11 million ransomware attempts and over 271 million intrusion attacks, according to research by cyber security company SonicWall. Their research found that encrypted threats had risen by 35% and Internet of Things malware by 33% since the beginning of 2022.

Digital Health: SonicWall: Independent: Verdict: DataBreaches: CybersecurityConnnect:

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