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A cyber attack on pathology services provider Synnovis Group LLP discovered earlier this month is likely to cause disruptions for London hospitals for months to come, according to the NHS.
The Qilin ransomware gang was blamed for an attack on the pathology group, initially affecting five London hospitals. However, the number of hospitals affected has since increased and includes those outside of London.
Now, an NHS source speaking with media has warned that the recovery process could take months.
“It is unclear how long it will take for the services to get back to normal, but it is likely to take many months,” the well-placed official said.
“Key to a return to normal will be clarity about how the hackers gained access to the system, how many records have been affected and whether these records are retrievable.”
Additionally, the attack has left hospitals unable to carry out blood transfusions and having to cancel tests and other pathology operations, leading to the NHS calling on blood donors to rapidly respond, as blood only has a shelf life of 35 days.
Earlier this week, the NHS blood donation website set-up a queuing system for blood donation appointments, which it uses when demand is high, and called on all O positive and O negative donors to book appointments to donate blood at one of 25 donation centres across England.
O blood type is the universal blood type, and it is used in emergency surgeries or when blood types are unknown, as it is safe for use with everyone.
Last week, the NHS announced that it suffered the attack, saying that some operations were halted.
“All urgent and emergency services remain open as usual, and the majority of outpatient services continue to operate as normal,” said the NHS.
“Unfortunately, some operations and procedures which rely more heavily on pathology services have been postponed, and blood testing is being prioritised for the most urgent cases, meaning some patients have had phlebotomy appointments cancelled.”
Additionally, Synnovis chief executive Mark Dollar said that its systems had been interrupted.
“This has affected all Synnovis IT systems, resulting in interruptions to many of our pathology services,” he said, adding that the hospitals declared a “critical incident” that affected the delivery of services such as blood transfusion.
Dollar also blamed the incident on Russian ransomware gang Qilin.
“We believe it is a Russian group of cyber criminals who call themselves Qilin,” he told BBC Radio 4.
“They’re simply looking for money. It’s unlikely they would have known that they would have caused such serious primary healthcare disruption when they set out to attack the company.”
At the time of writing, Cyber Daily observed that Qilin’s dark web ransom blog was down, showing a 0xf2 error, suggesting the site was now disconnected.
There are currently no reports of the threat group claiming the attack on Synnovis Group or any evidence that data was stolen or leaked.
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