It has come to light that the University of Manchester fell victim to a Ransomware Hack, which resulted in the breach of 1.1 million NHS patients’ information from 200 hospitals.
This event has caused great concern and raised important questions about data security.
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Ransomware is malicious software (malware) designed to lock devices and prevent users or organizations from accessing their computer files.
In the attack more than a million NHS (National Health Services) patients’ data has been breached; the senior health chief has warned that.
The information exploited includes NHS numbers and the first three letters of patients’ postcodes. Also, it includes trauma patients and people treated after terror attacks.
These pieces of information are gathered by the university for research purposes.
The universities have confirmed that backup servers were accessed, but they don’t know who was responsible for the attack or how many patients were impacted by the breach.
According to the investigation, they found 250 gigabytes of data had been accessed, according to The Independent report.
The NHS chief cautioned “UoM about the risk of NHS data being exposed to the public when the data set was made available”, as a result, the data set has been closed.
The UoM said that they found the attack by June 5, and we confirmed by June 23 that student and alumni data had been copied.
On August 5, 2022, a significant incident occurred where a group of hackers gained unauthorized access to the data of several mental health trusts, community hospitals, and out-of-hours GP services via NHS 111. Although the incident is now considered irrelevant, it had serious implications.
The impact of these incidents, they continue to work with relevant authorities and partners, including the Information Commissioner’s Office, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the National Crime Agency, and other regulatory bodies, and the organization said: “that we are not able to comment further at this stage.”
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