Cyber security news round-up

Our latest news round up from the world of cyber security includes research from Imperial College London which has suggested the NHS’ lack of security preparedness leaves our health system at “risk of major reputational and financial loss”. Elsewhere UK Cloud has announced it is embedding a vulnerability scanning and reporting tool into it’s core capabilities to help organisations improve their cyber security health.

Health sector needs to be ‘more proactive’ with cyber security

The lead author of research which looked into challenges of cybersecurity in the NHS and other health systems has said the sector needs to be “more proactive”.

Lead by Imperial College London’s Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI), the research revealed the NHS’ lack of security preparedness and poorly defined responsibilities in the face of a cyber-attack leaves our health system at risk of major reputational and financial loss.

Dr Saira Ghafur, IGHI’s lead for digital health, said: “The take home message is that we need to be more proactive and not reactive when it comes to cyber security in healthcare.

“It needs to be much easier for frontline NHS organisations to have a clear sight of accountability in terms of what they need to do to ensure systems’ robustness in the face of a cyber threat.”

UK Cloud adds tool to help organisations improve their cyber health

UK Cloud has announced it is embedding a vulnerability scanning and reporting tool into it’s core capabilities to help organisations improve their cyber security health.

CyberScore is a fully automated, rapid, and scalable cyber security testing and rating service which enables users to discover their cybersecurity “score” and generate reports.

Leighton James, chief technology officer at UKCloud, said: “Here at UKCloud, we use CyberScore internally to ensure that we are continually aware of our cyber posture and stay on top of risks.

“We identified that many of our customers face similar challenges and wanted to make this easy to use tool available to deploy across our multi-cloud platform.

“It marks the start of exciting new capabilities being made available to our customers to help meet the new challenge facing operations teams in the cyber and operations space’’

Research suggests confidence around cyber security in healthcare is at an all-time high

Research has suggested confidence around cyber security in healthcare is at an all-time high, more than two years on from the WannaCry attack.

The study, carried out by Infoblox, involved 606 healthcare IT professionals across the globe, including the UK.

Of those questioned, 91% of healthcare IT professionals are now confident in their organisation’s ability to respond to a cyber-attack, compared to only 82 percent two years ago.

Rob Bolton, Director of Western Europe at Infoblox said: “The widespread disruption caused by the WannaCry attack on the NHS two years ago was a wake-up call to healthcare providers everywhere. We can expect the risk of such attacks to continue to grow as technology is more widely adopted. It’s encouraging, therefore, to see more spending on cyber-security provision, and a more sensible approach to managing the connected devices that have become increasingly crucial to the efficient delivery of care.

“By taking such precautions, healthcare IT providers are right to be more confident about their ability to tackle threats to their network. They mustn’t become complacent, though, and must continue to think strategically about ensuring the security of their networks and – most importantly – the safety of their patients.”