Cyberattack Exposes Over A Million NHS Patients’ Details, Raising Privacy Concerns
In a concerning incident, the personal details of more than a million National Health Service (NHS) patients have been compromised in a cyberattack, raising significant data security concerns within the healthcare system.
According to sources, the attack targeted the University of Manchester, resulting in a breach of an NHS patient data set that contains information on approximately 1.1 million patients across 200 hospitals.
The compromised data set includes sensitive information such as NHS numbers and the first three letters of patients’ postcodes. Of particular concern is the fact that the dataset includes records of major trauma patients nationwide and individuals who received treatment following terror attacks. The University of Manchester had collected this information for research purposes.
While the extent of the breach remains uncertain, the university has alerted health officials that it is unaware of the exact number of affected patients or whether names were also compromised in the attack.
An NHS document revealed that specialist analysis indicated unauthorized access to the university’s backup servers, although the attacker’s identity remains unknown.
Following the incident, the University of Manchester cautioned NHS chiefs about the potential risk of NHS data being exposed in the public domain. As a precaution, the affected data set has been closed off to prevent further unauthorized access. Some patients might be unaware that their information was stored in the database since their consent was not explicitly sought when the database was established in 2012.
According to the university’s investigation, an estimated 250 gigabytes of data were accessed during the breach. It is crucial to note that this incident is unrelated to a separate hack on August 5 last year.
It disrupted the software used to access patient data across NHS 111, several mental health trusts, community hospitals, and out-of-hours GP services. The prolonged outage caused significant safety risks, including the potential for incorrect medication dosages and the inability of clinicians to adequately assess mentally unwell patients.
