NHS hack was by North Korea

HACKERS in North Korea were behind the cyber attack that crippled the NHS last month, officials believe.

Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre and the US National Security Agency concluded the global ransomware virus was launched by a hacking group called Lazarus, sources said.

The gang has also been blamed for a string of hacks since 2009, including one on Sony Pictures in 2014. It is unclear if the attack was sanctioned by North Korea’s government, but officials believe the gang was ‘sponsored by’ the rogue state’s spy agency, the Reconnaissance General Bureau. The ‘WannaCry’ virus, which infected 300,000 computers in 150 countries, locked files and demanded £230 to release them.

It is thought £110,000 of ransoms were paid in online currency Bitcoin.

Yet the hackers do not appear to have cashed in the Bitcoins because an operational error made the payments too easy to track. Computer code in the WannaCry virus also appeared in other Lazarus hacks. Adrian Nish, cyber intelligence chief at security and defence firm BAE Systems, told the BBC: ‘ The code overlaps are significant.’

The cyber attack hit 48 NHS trusts, roughly a third of the health service, causing thousands of operations to be cancelled.