NHS in Cumbria Targeted By Hackers

The NHS in Cumbria has been targeted by hackers more than 150 times in the last five years, it has been revealed.

15:31 22 January 2019

The BBC has recently revealed that the NHS in Cumbria has been targeted by hackers more than 150 times in the last five years. 147 of the said attacks were directed at University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust, which runs hospitals in Barrow, Kendal, Lancaster and Morecambe.

 

In 2017, NHS staff were locked out of computer systems by hackers and were forced to transfer emergency patients to Carlisle.

 

Lee Coward, the trust's head of information technology, said: "We spend a lot of time and resources on ensuring our IT systems are safe,"

 

BBC News has also found that the rest of the county’s councils and NHS trusts were, by comparison, targeted 14 times in total between 2014 and 2018.

 

Meanwhile, Copeland Borough Council has spent £2million recovering from an attack last year. Discussing the nature of the attack, independent elected mayor Mike Starkie said:

 

"We had 60 anti-virus systems running and only three of those actually detected that there was anything in the system.

 

"None of them picked up actually what it was."

 

He added that the affect of the attack has been ‘devastating.’