Mega UK hospitals trust Barts says IT borkage was due to trojan – not ransomware

Oh, well, that's all right then

Barts Health NHS Trust has blamed the disruption of its IT systems last Friday on a trojan horse infection and not ransomware.

The trust, which runs five east London hospitals and is among the biggest in the UK, was forced to quarantine systems in response to the outbreak last week. In an update on Monday, the trust said that systems are back to normal and there was no leak of confidential data.

On Friday 13 January 2017 Barts Health discovered and took immediate steps to contain a virus in the Trust's computers. The virus has been quarantined, and all major clinical systems are now up and running. No patient data was affected, there was no unauthorised access to medical records, and our anti-virus protection has now been updated to prevent any recurrence.

Early reports on Friday, based on a supposed email sent out to staff, said that the trust was grappling with a file-scrambling ransomware outbreak, like many of its sister NHS hospitals before it. Dead wrong, according to the trust. "The incident was caused by Trojan malware, not ransomware. The particular virus has never been seen before and, whilst it had the potential to do significant damage to computer network files, our measures to contain the virus were successful," it said. ®