North Korea blamed for cyberattack on hospitals

Britain yesterday blamed North Korea for a ransomware attack this year that a new report revealed affected a third of English hospitals and could have been prevented with “basic” IT security.

“This attack, we believe quite strongly that it came from a foreign state,” Ben Wallace, a junior minister for security, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“North Korea was the state that we believe was involved in this worldwide attack,” he said, adding the government was “as sure as possible”.

Appointments cancelled

The WannaCry attack in May infected some 300,000 computers in 150 countries, including in Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), Spanish telecoms company Telefonica and US logistics company FedEx.

Britain’s National Audit Office revealed the attack had hit NHS England particularly hard, forcing the cancellation of some 19,500 medical appointments.

Computers at 81 hospital groups across England were affected — a third of the total number of 236.

Some 600 general practitioners were also affected.

“Dan Taylor, NHS Digital’s head of security said the NHS had “learned a lot” from WannaCry, calling it “an international attack on an unprecedented scale”.