NHS St Helens Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) has been warned that health services in the borough face a significant cyber-attack threat.
An assessment conducted as part of the CCG’s risk management strategy determined that more needed to be done to protect IT systems run by the St Helens and Knowsley Health Informatics Services (HIS).
The report states that an attack on healthcare services in St Helens could result in “significant service disruption”, in addition to “harm to patients and financial loss”.
The CCG scores risk factors on scale of zero to 25. The threat from cyber attacks in St Helens has been given a risk factor of 12, which is classified as ‘high’ under the rating system.
“The IT systems run by the HIS are coming under increased risk regarding service disruption as a result of potential cyber security attacks,” the report states.
“A successful cyber-attack could result in the loss of data or system outage including primary, secondary and community systems as well as local CCG IT systems.”
The report did not specify the nature of the vulnerabilities or where they lay within the borough. St Helens CCG said it was unable to…
