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Threat actors have brought a UK hospital to its knees after a cyber attack led to an outage, resulting in delayed procedures.
The Wirral University Teaching Hospital (WUTH), which is part of the NHS Foundation Trust, disclosed the cyber incident earlier this week.
The organisation runs a number of hospitals, providing 24-hour emergency care as well as critical care, surgery, cancer care, maternity services, acute medical services, pediatrics and diagnostic services.
The latest update published yesterday (28 November) said it expects delays to continue.
“We expect the major incident that was declared at the Trust earlier this week to continue over the weekend. The major incident was declared following a targeted cyber security issue, and we are working hard to rectify the issue,” the WUTH statement said.
“After detecting suspicious activity, as a precaution, we isolated our systems to ensure that the problem did not spread. This resulted in some IT systems being offline. We have reverted to our business continuity processes and are using paper rather than digital in the areas affected. We are working closely with the national cyber security services, and we are planning to return to normal services at the earliest opportunity.
“Our staff are working tirelessly to ensure that safe patient care remains our priority.”
The hospital added that outages have resulted in some procedures being postponed, as planned services had been disrupted.
“The public are advised to continue to attend any scheduled appointments, along with their appointment letters, unless contacted otherwise,” the update said.
“The Trust continues to prioritise emergency treatment, but there are likely to be longer-than-usual waiting times for unplanned treatment in our Emergency Department and assessment areas.”
A source speaking with ECHO said that the hospital has resorted to manual operations as “everything is done electronically, so there’s no access to records, results or anything”, adding that “the damage is huge”.
“We were told that, because of the cyber attack, they couldn’t take any appointments as they couldn’t access any of the files or documents. They said no X-rays, no treatments and no theatres were operating today, and they didn’t know how long it would continue for,” the source said.
“They said they think they will send people to Liverpool hospitals for some appointments eventually, but they just didn’t know. There were a number of people turning up for appointments when we were there, a family with kids were all told to go home.”
At this stage, no threat actors have claimed responsibility for the cyber attack.
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