Cyber attack on UK hospital disrupts operations and disruption will continue
Threat actors have brought a UK hospital to its knees after a cyberattack caused an outage, causing delays to procedures.
Wirral University Hospital (WUTH), which is part of the NHS Foundation Trust, revealed the cyber incident earlier this week.
The organization runs several hospitals and provides 24-hour emergency care, as well as intensive care, surgery, cancer care, maternity services, acute medical services, pediatrics and diagnostic services.
The latest update posted yesterday (November 28) said delays are expected to continue.
“We expect the major incident reported at the Trust earlier this week to continue over the weekend. “The serious incident was declared following a specific cybersecurity issue and we are working hard to rectify the issue,” the WUTH statement said.
“After detecting suspicious activity, as a precaution, we isolated our systems to ensure the issue did not spread. This caused some IT systems to go offline. We have returned to our business continuity processes and are using paper instead of digital in the affected areas. We are working closely with national cybersecurity services and plan to return to normal services as soon as possible.
“Our staff is working tirelessly to ensure safe patient care remains our priority.”
The hospital added that the disruptions caused some procedures to be postponed as planned services had been disrupted.
“The public is advised to continue attending any scheduled appointments, along with their appointment letters, unless contacted otherwise,” the update said.
“The Trust continues to prioritize emergency treatment, but there are likely to be longer than usual waiting times for unplanned treatments in our Emergency Department and assessment areas.”
A source talking to ECHO He said the hospital has resorted to manual operations since “everything is done electronically, so there is no access to records, results or anything,” adding that “the damage is enormous.”
“They told us that due to the cyber attack, they could not make any appointments because they could not access any of the files or documents. “They said there were no
“They said they think they will eventually send people to Liverpool hospitals for some appointments, but they just didn’t know. “There were several people who came to appointments when we were there, one family with children was told to go home.”
So far, no threat actor has claimed responsibility for the cyberattack.
