NHS data breach shows threat cyber criminals pose us all

Edinburgh team leads fight to raise our guard against online fraudsters and extortionists

A breach is just a click away: Pic by Pixabay

A few facts and figures followed by a question: Around the world we send 294 BILLION emails every day and 5 BILLION text messages. Around 91% of UK businesses and 75% of UK people are on the internet.

In the UK we spend in the region of £50 BILLION online a year. That works out at around £5.7 million every hour of every day, seven days a week. And all of that adds up to a whole lot of temptation.

So now for the quick query: How well protected are you from cyber criminals? Do you have any idea?

Away from bare statistics, events at NHS Dumfries and Galloway this week, which has seen patient records accessed, stolen by organised cyber-criminals and shared on the Dark Web after a ransom was refused, have put fast-rising cyber crime front of minds – for now.

The records taken include young people referred for mental health issues, amongst other things. The potentially tragic consequences of such information finding its way into the public domain is obvious and strong appeals are being made to the public not to share any of the information which finds its way onto the internet via social media.

Edinburgh has seen such attacks. Last year, Lyndsey Jackson, deputy chief executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, said that the organisation could have potentially withstood a crippling attack which knocked out its internal systems, if it had two-stage authentication measures protecting its Office 365 administration software. The Fringe refused to pay a $15,000 ransom demand from the Russia-linked Conti gang, but the recovery cost £65,000.

And in September last year, Edinburgh Trams confirmed it was the victim of an attack which shut down its website for a short time. The attack, carried out by another Russian hacker group NoName057, was designed to gain attention and interrupt services rather than extract sensitive data.

With cyber crime soaring exponentially we need to be concerned – all of us. A UK Government report into cyber crime put the cost of this increasingly organised crime activity at an estimated £27 billion.