NHS reveals cost of Wannacry emergency measures

MP discloses cost of implementing emergency measures after ransomware attack hit in May

The Wannacry attack in May cost the NHS £180,000 in emergency measures, an MP has said.

A number of NHS trusts in the UK, as well as organisations across 150 countries, were left stricken by Wannacry - resulting in NHS services being shut down and operations reportedly being cancelled.

Responding on 27 June to a question on the Parliament website Jackie Doyle-Price, Conservative MP for Thurrock and parliamentary under-secretary for the Department of Health, said that total cost of the emergency measures implemented was £180,000 - covered by the budgets of NHS Digital and NHS England.

"Cyber-resilience in the health and care system is an issue that the government takes very seriously," she said. "We have changed the NHS standard contract to include, from April 2017, cybersecurity requirements.

"The 12 May 2017 ransomware incident affected the NHS in the UK. It is standard practice to review any major incident in the NHS. Further, the chief information officer for health and care is undertaking a review into the May 2017 cyberattack which is expected to conclude in the autumn."

Doyle-Price added that any costs incurred by individual trusts or other NHS organisations are not included in the figure, with these costs not collected centrally by the government or the NHS.

Unsupported operating systems

Machines running older operating system (OS) Windows XP were considered to be more at risk to the Wannacry exploit than newer versions of the OS, which is why the NHS is thought to have been hit so hard by the attack.

A series of Freedom of Information requests made by CRN in March - two months before the Wannacry attack - revealed that 4.7 per cent of all NHS machines were still running Windows XP.

This same figure was quoted by the NHS the day after the Wannacry attack hit and has again been used by Doyle-Price, who claimed that the percentage is down from December 2015 when between 15 and 18 per cent of machines were running XP.