Cyberattack impacts major London hospitals

A cyberattack has severely impacted major hospitals in London, leading to the cancellation of operations and the diversion of emergency patients.

King’s College Hospital, Guy’s and St Thomas’, and Evelina London Children’s Hospital are reported to be among the affected institutions.

This attack has caused major disruptions to critical services, particularly blood transfusions and test results, significantly impairing service delivery.

Oseloka Obiora, CTO at Riversafe, said there is a need for robust cybersecurity measures to be implemented across the healthcare sector.

“To enhance readiness, it is essential that security teams adopt robust network visibility to promptly identify and resolve vulnerabilities across systems, minimising the impact of cyberthreats to vital infrastructure,” he said.

Mark Jow, Technical Evangelist at Gigamon, said: “The cyber-incident affecting London hospitals is extremely serious. Unfortunately, all too often bad actors know the potential for disruption and use this as an opportunity to extort more money from their victims, and downtime can be devastating in the healthcare sector. It’s fair to say in situations like this it has the potential to be a ‘life or death’ matter, for those patients affected.  

“It is vital that healthcare organisations and any security leaders operating within our critical national infrastructure take note of this incident.”