I suspect that the worst is yet to come. Maybe it's just repetitions before the mother of all the attacks which could destabilize the whole world with the consequences that we can imagine
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General / Off-Topic NHS cyber-attack: GPs and hospitals hit by ransomware
- Thread starter Pyrotiger
- Start date
I suspect that the worst is yet to come. Maybe it's just repetitions before the mother of all the attacks which could destabilize the whole world with the consequences that we can imagine
I think Beelbeebub means Business Continuity plans rather than just computer backups. Essentially the servers can be as recoverable as you want but the upshot of this type of attack is the actual clients were being locked down. I ended up going home early as I wasn't working directly on clinical systems and to stop the spread we had to switch off all non essential clinical PC's.
And on Business Continuity - yeah they'd have them, or they should have them, we did and we weren't very heavily affected AFAIK but even though our BC plans were in place there will have been a knock on effect. It's simply impossible to provide full BC cover that runs at the same speed as a fully working, fully integrated, computer system without building in massive amounts of redundancy. And the NHS has had years of cuts rather than years of investment.
At every level it's hard not to see this as a massive failure of the current government to plan and invest in a safe system but don't worry - they absolved themselves of any responsibility when the Health and Social Care Act went through. So that's alright then.
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Trust me, you'd be just as hamstrung by politics as anyone. I know some really good people, far brighter than me who try as hard as possible to cover exactly this sort of thing only to have funding cut, or even moved away from their primary post. Maybe I need thicker tin foil but at times I'd swear it's meant to fail.
Wouldn't disagree at all, none of this is decided by the NHS staff though, always driven by government but oddly blamed on the NHS.
If only!
Renault announces that several of its production sites are stopped in France
German Railways have been affected too.
If there were any delays because of it, noone noticed them
Keep hidden mandatory backup and just reinstall and reboot. Should make this type of attacks marginalized.
Never ever pay these terrorists. Because if you do, they just keep doing it, and doing it even worse ( with guns they bought for the ransom money ).
These types of attacks will be standard every day events in the near future, so better suck it up and get used to it.
Never ever pay these terrorists. Because if you do, they just keep doing it, and doing it even worse ( with guns they bought for the ransom money ).
These types of attacks will be standard every day events in the near future, so better suck it up and get used to it.
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As CMDR Heisenburg said, I'm not worried about the computer system, or backups or any of that.
I'm wondering about how you can continue to.run the NHS (albeit at reduced efficiency) with no computers.
Stuff like having printed copies of the phone directory, a system for registering people with simplified (pre printed forms) starting rotoas already drawn up for drawing extra.staff (particularly admin, porters etc) to help with moving the paper and files.around.
Even simple stuff like having those rope barriers and mowing where they are laid out to control the extra queuing to prevent corridors being blocked, enough trollies.for moving stuff about and so on.
It's about graceful failure not catastrophic collapse.
I'm wondering about how you can continue to.run the NHS (albeit at reduced efficiency) with no computers.
Stuff like having printed copies of the phone directory, a system for registering people with simplified (pre printed forms) starting rotoas already drawn up for drawing extra.staff (particularly admin, porters etc) to help with moving the paper and files.around.
Even simple stuff like having those rope barriers and mowing where they are laid out to control the extra queuing to prevent corridors being blocked, enough trollies.for moving stuff about and so on.
It's about graceful failure not catastrophic collapse.
This is basically why Windows 10 has automatic updates that are as 'annoying' as they are because 'normal' people are very bad at updating their software.
NHS should have had a better protection, heck simply better network control and this likely could have been avoided.
And yeah someone is going to get fired at the very least over this once they figure out the source computer, the computer that originally let the worm inside, because my bet is that it was, as per usual user error.
Generally speaking you can't, you'll have to go back to practices that meant a certain percentage of the patients die, just as they used to. You could look at this as bad or see the benefit in modern information/computer tech.
I have very little say in these things, but here's an idea.
Each department that is considered essential has a private, hard wired, not connected to any external network, server (and clients for that matter). This network can be linked between departments but can not be accessed outside this local wired network (it's not connected to the normal local network let alone N3).
Given a disaster such as this recoveries from the most recent backup of the main system can be placed onto the segregated network. This would allow a local hospital to continue on its own pretty much unaffected. It'd need transaction logging for all that happens on this system to be placed onto the actual live systems once the threat is over.
The trouble is there may be vital, life and death, information at one site that's needed for that patient to remain alive when transferred to another so you'd also need a way of transferring data from one locality to the other. This could be a phone call or encrypted USB stick or other but it's possible.
It's about the only way I can see such a complex service truly having Business Continuity to a degree that it can still function without massive delays.
The cost though. Right now there's no way the NHS could afford this. You're talking duplicated servers, PC's, network cabling, network infrastructure, OS licenses (client and server), system licenses for additional server software that can run into millions for each site. All this would have to be upgraded manually to maintain the viability of those servers/PC's/networking/software/printers/smart card readers and so on so you'd need extra staff as well.
Like I said you can do this if you allow for redundancy and we can, as a society, decide that's worth doing. It'd be a tiny increase in National Insurance but it'd make a far more redundant system.
Of course the one off deal with MS that Jeremy cancelled would help massively with mitigating some of these costs - but hey if you see him in game feel free to waste him - I know I have.
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Obviously, before the digital age, patient files, bookings, inventory etc were all non digital (duh!)
With digital comes potential efficiency, X rays can be done in the xray dept and viewed in the consultant's office minutes later, rather than films be developed and then hand delivered to the consultant. The same with lab results, patient histories etc. Even where a patient was in the hospital, daily appointments and so on.
If the computer system were to go down, is there not a potential backup procedure, in the same way pilots have a defined procedure if they lose an engine or power, they don't "wing it" (sorry) they have a manual of procedures - "if engine fails, set fuel switches to X, thrust levers to Y, trim tabs to Z" and so on.
Did the NHS have a similar "pre packed" system - even if it is inevitable less efficient than running with the computers - ready to go in the event that the computer system was unavailable and did it work? If the answer to either of those questions is "NO" then the disaster planning has a massive hole in it - which is a separate worry from the geeky worries about firewalls and data recovery.
Wow, this is turning out to be a Firesale scenario.
Minonian
Banned
And you think we must accept this or got used to it?
Both is unacceptable.
German Railways have been affected too.
If there were any delays because of it, noone noticed them
+1 for this. It made my Sunday morning
I would not want to see the destruction of my SSD and my processor by a virus. And in this case a backup is uselesss. But yes for the software part, it is indispensable
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Interesting how Microsoft benefits on all this pushing everyone to widows 10 which is what they want. Has no one heard of Linux? Apple must be laughing to. No reason NHS should have stop taking patients . Its all smoke and mirrors. Basically these windows xp were not patched with known vulnerabilities. I did not get this 'ransom where ' but a few weeks back a virgin media engineer pulled out my cable in the the junction box and never replaced it so had o wait a week so no ELlite Dangerous for me. Organisations don't want to employ experienced IT personal like me just snowflakes who cant assert themselves.
The cyberattack made more than 75.000 victims in the world, according to a provisional estimate of the French police. It is a balance sheet, still temporary, of the infected number of computers, which should grow heavy, very most probably in the days to come ", declared on Saturday to AFP Valérie Maldonado, assistant in head of the division of the fight against the cybercrime.
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Seems quite far reaching, FedEx in the states was hit apparently as well.
It seems that the WannaCrypt Malware also dropped the DoublePulsar implant. There are a couple of Python scripts to help detect and clean up: https://github.com/countercept/doublepulsar-detection-script
I will be scheduling the detection script to run on a regular basis across the subnets I look after.
Wcrypt tracker: https://intel.malwaretech.com/botnet/wcrypt/?t=5m&bid=all
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