Britain’s National Health Service has said that it is investigating claims that hackers had published confidential data stolen from several London hospitals in a cyber attack on a blood testing lab on Friday.
Services at large London hospitals, including Guy’s, St Thomas’, and King’s, were still being disrupted following the June 3rd attack by hackers reportedly demanding ransom from Synnovis, a lab company that provides testing services.
According to the BBC, the Russian cybercriminal group Qilin shared almost 400 gigabytes of data—including patient names, dates of birth, NHS numbers, and blood test descriptions—on its darknet site and Telegram channel.
Synnovis, which conducts pathology tests on blood samples, primarily in southeast London, was the victim of a cyberattack on June 3.
“NHS England has been made aware that the cybercriminal group published data last night, which they claim belongs to Synnovis and was stolen as part of this attack,” the state-run unit said.
“We understand that people may be concerned about this, and we are continuing to work with Synnovis, the National Cyber Security Centre, and other partners to determine the content of the published files as quickly as possible,” NHS England said.
Test processing is still at reduced levels at the affected hospitals, and more than 1,000 elective procedures and 2,000 appointments have been cancelled since the incident.
