North Korea WAS behind cyber attack on the NHS

NORTH Korea was yesterday publicly blamed for launching the cyber attack that crippled the NHS this year.

Home Office Security Minister Ben Wallace said the Government believes ‘quite strongly’ that the rogue state was behind the attack which hit a third of NHS hospital trusts.

The Government and NHS were fiercely criticised for failing to stop the attack, which led to the cancellation of nearly 20,000 operations when staff at 81 hospitals were locked out of their computers on May 12.

In the first confirmation that the Government believes Kim Jong-un’s regime was responsible, Mr Wallace said: ‘ This attack, we believe quite strongly that it came from a foreign state. North Korea was the state that we believe was involved in this worldwide attack.

‘We can be as sure as possible. I can’t obviously go into the detailed intelligence but it is widely believed in the community and across a number of countries that North Korea had taken this role.’

Mr Wallace suggested the ‘Wannacry’ virus, which demanded a £230 ransom, could have been motivated by the economically isolated state to secure foreign funds. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he added: ‘North Korea has been potentially linked to other attacks about raising foreign currency.’

It comes after the National Audit Office yesterday warned health bosses to ‘get their act together’ to block more attacks.

Some 300,000 computers in 150 countries were infected but he ruled out reprisals saying: ‘If you get into tit-for-tat there has to be serious consideration about the risk we will expose UK systems to.

‘Other countries do have doctrines and military thinking along that line. But the West, the United States, Europe and the United Kingdom are much more thoughtful about these things.’