Sony hackers target NHS computers

Hospitals and primary care trusts alerted to security breach, but no patient’s medical records accessed during incident The NHS has been warned to beware of computer hackers after it was targeted by the same group that conducted cyber assaults on Sony and Nintendo. Hospital trusts and primary care trusts (PCTs) across England have been alerted to the security breach by Connecting for Health, the Department of Health’s IT branch, after one PCT was hacked. The perpetrators were self-styled international “pirate-ninja” hackers LulzSec, who describe themselves as “the world’s leaders in high-quality entertainment at your expense”. They gained attention recently when they penetrated the security of entertainment corporations. No patient’s medical records were accessed during the incident, the department stressed. It described it as “a local issue” and “quite a low-level” lapse in IT security which only affected part of the website of an unnamed NHS organisation – one of England’s 150 or so PCTs. “This is a local issue affecting a very small number of website administrators. No patient information has been compromised. No national NHS information systems have been affected. The Department has issued guidance about how to protect and secure all information assets,” a departmental spokeswoman said. “We are confident that there was no damage done and no harm done in terms of patient information or anything else.” The breach was uncovered by the magazine Health Service Journal. LulzSecclaimed to have obtained the passwords “months ago”. Earlier this month, LulzSec hacked in to the website of Sony Pictures Entertainment and exposed information from 37,000 users, including names, passwords, birthdates and email addresses. It also hacked into a webserver belonging to Nintendo in the US. The group claims it contacted the NHS on Wednesday to alert them to its breach of IT security. A version of LulzSec’s message with details of the passwords blanked out, and posted on Twitter, said that it said: “Greetings… we’re a somewhat known band of pirate-ninjas that go by LulzSec. Some time ago, we were traversing the internet for signs of enemy fleets. While you aren’t considered an enemy – your work is of course brilliant – we did stumble upon several of your admin passwords. We mean you no harm and only want to help you fix your tech issues.” In other tweets it added that “we never planned to exploit those passwords. We sit on admin passwords for many things” and that they “Blacked out some important areas until they fix the problem.” NHS Health Hacking Data and computer security Data protection Denis Campbell guardian.co.uk

Posted by on June 9, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.