(London) Sensitive medical data of British patients was published after a cyberattack targeting a service provider in early June, which is still disrupting the operation of large London hospitals, the public health service NHS said on Friday.
“NHS England has been informed that the cybercrime group published [on Thursday] evening data which they believe belongs to the provider Synnovis and was stolen in this attack,” it announced.
The major cyberattack carried out on June 3 against this blood testing company had a “major impact” on several services, including blood transfusions.
Operations at central London hospitals King’s College Hospital, Guy’s and St Thomas’ have been severely impacted, with thousands of appointments and operations cancelled over the past two weeks.
The BBC claims that the Russian cybercrime group Qilin is behind this attack.
He is said to have shared almost 400GB of data – including patient names, dates of birth, NHS numbers and descriptions of blood tests – overnight on Thursday night on their darknet site and on their Telegram channel .
“We understand that this may raise concerns and we continue to work with Synnovis, the National Cyber Security Center and other partners to report the contents of the published files as quickly as possible” and verify that they are indeed the data from Synnovis, NHS England said.
