UK National Health Service suppliers asked to tackle ‘endemic’ ransomware attacks

The chief executives of companies supplying Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) have been sent letters asking them to help tackle the “endemic” threat of ransomware attacks following a series of disruptive incidents.

In an open letter published Thursday, written “to highlight the growing and ever-changing cyber security threat level that we collectively face,” NHS suppliers were warned that incidents have been getting more severe and frequent in recent months.

The letter sets out NHS England’s views on best practices from suppliers, and asks them to take several steps — including to maintain immutable backups for recovery purposes, ensure multifactor authentication is turned on for network access, and apply the latest patches to address known vulnerabilities — to mitigate future attacks.

Read more at The Record