LONDON: Britain on Friday blamed North Korea for a ransomware attack this year that a new report revealed affected a third of English hospitals and could have been prevented with “basic” IT security. Britain’s National Audit Office revealed the attack had hit NHS England particularly hard, forcing the cancellation of some 19,500 medical appointments. The facilities affected were running computer systems—the majority Windows 7—that had not been updated to secure them against attacks, the NAO said. “It was a relatively unsophisticated attack and could have been prevented by the NHS following basic IT security best practice,” NAO chief Amyas Morse said. Ransomware attacks use a type of malware that encrypts files on an infected computer and demands money to unlock them.

Source: Manila Times October 27, 2017 10:41 UTC