At least four UK hospitals hit by malware

British hospital chain Barts Health is dealing with malware. Parts of the networks have been taken offline to prevent their further spread. Barts Health covers a total of five different hospitals and four of them are said to be affected.

A spokesperson for the hospitals reports that it would not be ransomware. It is not clear what kind of malware is involved. Parts of the network have been taken offline and patient data is said to be unaffected. Employees are warned not to open email attachments from foreign senders. Last year it turned out that a vast majority of such British hospital chains still run on Windows XP. Whether Barts Health does, however, cannot be stated with complete certainty.

The spokesperson further stated that ‘everything possible’ is being done to prevent this incident from having an impact on the care of the patients of the hospitals. It is currently not clear whether the hospitals will succeed in this.

Of the five Barts Health hospitals, at least four appear to be affected by the malware. That writes the British newspaper The Guardian. According to the Trust’s website, Barts Health has 15,000 employees and a catchment area with 2.5 million people living in it.

Hospitals are typically an attractive target for ransomware because of the importance and urgency of the work they do and the potentially poor IT security they employ. It is therefore not the first time that a hospital has been the target of a cyber attack. Last year, for example, a hospital in the US was hit by ransomware. The institution decided to pay the $15,000 Bitcoin ransom to get its files back.