NHS hacked: world needs a ‘cyber police force’

Security experts have called for a “global cyber police force” to fight the kind of huge ransomware hack that disrupted the NHS and thousands of other business and organisations worldwide.

Professor Mark Skilton of Warwick Business School said that an international effort would “help manage these escalating threats with the right level of specialist skills”, and that technology companies shouldn’t be left to “sort it out for themselves”.

He said the scale of the ‘Wannacry’ attack showed that we are in “open full scale war with the criminals”.

Microsoft responded to the attack, which targeted computers running Windows XP, by repeating its call for a ‘Digital Geneva Convention’ to establish international standards for fighting cyber warfare.

In a blog post ( www.snipca. com/24385) Brad Smith, the company’s President and Chief Legal Officer, said: “The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake-up call. They need to take a different approach and adhere in cyberspace to the same rules applied to weapons in the physical world”.

Professor Skilton agreed, warning that “the risk and impact of cyber weapons can do the same or more harm than physical weapons”.

The attack began on Friday 12 May, with hospitals and GP surgeries reporting that their computers had been locked, and were displaying a ransom message demanding $300 in the digital currency Bitcoin (see screenshot). Thousands of operations and appointments were cancelled.

Businesses and organisations attacked worldwide included Spanish telecoms company Telefonica, German railway firm Deutsche Bahn and several Chinese universities.

Microsoft rushed out a fix for the flaw in XP exploited by Wannacry, its first security

update for the operating system since 2014. But within days the ransomware had evolved to bypass the fix.

By Monday 15 May over 230,000 computers had been infected in 150 countries, making it easily the most devastating cyber attack ever.