Companies prepare for more ransomware attacks on Monday

“Patients who have appointments booked for Monday and beyond should attend as planned”.

“We would like to thank everyone for their cooperation”.

“The healthcare centres in many countries are particularly vulnerable”.

Television news broadcasts led on the impact on the hospitals, while the opposition Labour Party said Prime Minister Theresa May’s response the crisis had been poor and that her Conservative government had failed to invest enough in the health service.

Other organisations targeted include Germany’s rail network Deutsche Bahn, Spanish telecommunications operator Telefonica, French carmaker Renault, US logistics giant FedEx and Russia’s Interior Ministry.

The malware problems that afflicted the three community sites were described as isolated incidents. So far, not many people have paid the ransom demanded by the malware, Europol spokesman Jan Op Gen Oorth told The Associated Press. Movie servers weren’t affected and are running as normal, it said in a text message Monday.

It wasn’t immediately clear to what degree nations across Asia were being affected by the attack Monday.

14 per cent of NHS trusts said they would be transitioning to a new operating system by the end of 2016 while 29 per cent pledged to make the move sometime this year.

Images that were posted online of the NHS pop-up look almost identical to pop-up ransomware windows that hit Spain’s Telefonica, a powerful attack that forced the large telecom to order employees to disconnect their computers from its network and to resort to an intercom system to relay messages, according to Bleeping Computer. “We’ve seen that the slowdown of the infection rate over Friday night, after a temporary fix around it, has now been overcome by a second variation the criminals have released”.

Government agencies said they were unaffected. We have been working with 47 organisations providing urgent and emergency care who have been infected to varying degrees.

A “lessons learned” exercise will also take place to help mitigate the risks from further attacks.

Dr Krishna Chinthapalli, a neurology registrar at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, had warned that an increasing number of hospitals could be shut down by ransomeware attacks in an article on the vulnerability of the NHS network in the “British Medical Journal” on Wednesday, two days before the major cyber-hack.

“Any clinics or appointments that have needed to be re-scheduled have been done so, and patients advised”. If you are now a user of Windows XP, you need to upgrade it as soon as possible.

The hackers are believed to have used “cyber weapons” stolen from the US’ National Security Agency to lock up computers and hold users’ files for ransom.

Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland, Ms Sturgeon said: “A big priority over the weekend has been making sure NHS boards are minimising the impact on patients”.

A spokesman said: “Our understanding is that if that had been acted on it would have prevented [the malware attack]”.

In his first public comments since the attack on Friday, Mr Hunt told Sky News: “Although we have never seen anything on this scale when it comes to ransomware attacks, they are relatively common and there are things that you can do, that everyone can do, all of us can do, to protect ourselves against them”.

The National Crime Agency encourages victims not to pay any ransom and to contact Action Fraud.

Dr Nicky Williams, the commissioning group’s deputy clinical chairman, said: “I’d like to thank patients for their understanding at this hard time”.