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 and operations at a cost of £92million.