Barts Health Trust hit by cyber breach

Barts Health Trust, England's largest NHS Trust, is investigating an alleged cyber attack.

So far, the trust has said it has ruled out ransomware as the cause, and believes Trojan malware to be behind the breach.

In a statement, the trust said: “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.

“In addition to the trust’s core clinical system Cerner Millennium, Radiology and imaging from X-rays and scans continue to be used. The computerised pathology results service is now back online and processing requests as normal - it may take a day or so to deal with the backlog that built up during the short period when we processed requests manually.”

The incident follows a similar attack on the Northern Lincolnshire and Goole Foundation Trust in October, when malware was used to encrypt files on the trust's system and demand a ransom in order to access them again.