Trusts were told about security patch last month — NHS cyberattack

Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, said the incident should serve as a “wake-up call” to the USA and other world governments, as it highlights the need for countries to rethink how they conceive of cybersecurity.

The number of ransomware-affected cases is still rising.

“(A new attack) is a huge concern right now”, Huss told ABC News.

“Many of those victims were businesses, including large corporations”.

The minister assisting the prime minister for cyber security, Dan Tehan, said that government agencies and the nation’s critical infrastructure have not been affected by the malware campaign.

Meanwhile, new versions of the ransomware have reportedly surfaced, including one without the kill switch exploited by a 22-year-old computer security researcher to shut the attack down. At least some of those emails appeared to be messages from a bank about a money transfer. At that time, Microsoft had released a page to fix these vulnerabilities. And while Microsoft said it had already released a security update to patch the vulnerability one month earlier, the sequence of events fed speculation that the NSA hadn’t told the USA tech giant about the security risk until after it had been stolen.

Capitalising on spying tools believed to have been developed by the United States National Security Agency, the virus dubbed WannaCry has blocked more than 200,000 computers across the globe, demanding a ransom to unlock them.

Global standards should compel countries not to stockpile or exploit software vulnerabilities, Smith says.

The trust, which runs Boston, Lincoln and Grantham hospitals, says to attend “unless patients recieve a telephone call” saying otherwise as some systems are still affected.

“We back up what we put into the system every night, but Friday’s information will be gone”.

Tehan said that Australia’s critical infrastructure had also avoided infection.

NHS health boards in Scotland were warned in February of the need to review the resilience and backup procedures of their computer systems to protect patient data from cyber attacks, the Scottish Government said last night.

Questions have been raised over Trident’s vulnerability to potential cyber attacks, as the system is believed to use ageing Window’s XP software – the same operating system targeted by the global ransomware attack.