RUSSIAN HACKERS THREATEN THE NHS

Data-grabbing bug canwreak havoc

HEALTH chiefs have ordered urgent action to thwart a suspected Russian cyber attack that could further cripple the NHS.

A sleeper bug is feared to have been planted in computers in March to harvest confidential patient data.

The software is also used by vaccine regulators and the alarm was raised after similar US systems were hacked.

A “high severity” alert has been issued across the NHS network. Now the race is on to find a way to activate a “kill switch” which SolarWinds, the Texas-based company providing the software, has devised.

The bug – in SolarWinds’ Orion Platform – could wreak havoc in a repeat of the 2017 attack which caused the cancellation of 19,000 appointments

USA is blaming Putin and operations at a cost of £92million. Investigators from the National Cyber Security Centre have been called in.

A Whitehall source described the attack as a “hugely sophisticated operation committed by a state actor”. America’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency

alerted Britain on

Thursday. It said “critical infrastructure” had been damaged, federal agencies and private companies compromised and the damage posed a “grave threat”.

NHS Digital told the Sunday Mirror its system “has been the subject of a supply- chain compromise by an unidentified source”.

A statement said: “We have issued a high severity alert to the NHS which explains the action to take to mitigate this threat and we urge organisations to follow these instructions promptly.”

The hacked software is also used by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, responsible for giving final approval to Covid vaccines.

Private security companies in the US are pointing the finger at President Putin and the Kremlin. Earlier this year a cyber campaign was launched from within Russia attempting to ridicule the AstraZeneca vaccine with wild claims that it turned people into monkeys.

A spokesman for the Russian embassy said it “does not conduct offensive operations in the cyber domain”.

SolarWinds is used across Whitehall and a trawl is under way to find which systems have the Orion component.

We’ve issued a high severity alert to the NHS and we urge organisations to act promptly NHS DIGITAL WARNING ON SLEEPER BUG PLANTED IN SYSTEM