Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) is all set to spend £20 million on a Central cybersecurity unit that will use the funds in hiring ethical hackers to probe for vulnerabilities in the healthcare’s IT Infrastructure.
As the National Audit Office has concluded last month that the WannaCry attack could have been prevented by basic IT security practice NHS has decided to avoid further embarrassment in future. And so has decided to improve the investments against its defense line towards cyber threats.
“In the year 2016, NHS Digital just shelled out 6 million pounds for digital defense. Now, the healthcare is planning to tender 191 million pounds to improve the Cyber Threats defense infrastructure for NHS”, said UK Government Contract’s Analyst Tussel.
NHS Digital hopes that the contract will help avoid a repeat of WannaCry attack on England’s hospitals in future. The healthcare chief said that the funds will be utilized to monitor the internet for emerging cyber threats and to thwart cyber attacks of any range.
In May this year, NHS was hit by a ransomware cyber attack in which around 60,000 computers on the network were disrupted. And as a result of this attack many patients, staff, and doctors had to get their appointments, treatments, and diagnosis postponed for weeks.
Note- Only emergency services were made available in the said time frame of digital devastation.
Technically speaking, the unit is going to act as a proactive division to help hospitals in danger of being hacked, rather than to wait for services to be hit. They will try to break into computer systems to expose vulnerabilities and will also suggest the fix.
In developed nations such as the United States and Canada, ethical hackers are hired on a quarterly basis to penetrate into the networks of large organizations to expose the vulnerabilities.
Now, NHS is planning to do the same tests on its digital systems in order to improve the cyber defense capabilities.
