National Health Service (NHS) is serious about to build strong hold on Cyber security

According to a latest report published by Redscan, it has been found that NHS is looking for more cyber security resource to protect against security breaches.

Use of online health check-up, health monitoring IoT devices and even surgeries are increasing the cyber threat day by day.

Last year a vulnerability inside the NHS system was affected by a serious ransomware attack, which speared over critical systems and encrypt the important data that caused cancelation of more than 6900 NHS appointments.

Redscan also found a threatening ratio, where NHS assigns only one cyber security experts out of 2,582 employees and also there are no information security training took place according to the most of the trusts.

Mark Nicholls, Redscan Director of Cyber Security, said:

“These findings shine a light on the cybersecurity failings of the NHS, which is struggling to implement a cohesive security strategy under difficult circumstances.

Individual trusts lack in-house cybersecurity talent and many are falling short of training targets; while investment in security and data protection training is patchy at best. The extent of discrepancies is alarming, as some NHS organisations are far better resourced, funded, and trained than others.”

Some trust reported that, after the ransomware attack NHS is planning to start cyber security training.

The decision of training internal employees rather hire cyber security professional clearly states that there are enough shortage of cyber security challenge.

“The cybersecurity skills gap continues to grow and it’s incredibly hard for organisations across all sectors to find enough people with the right knowledge and experience,” comments Nicholls. “It’s even tougher for the NHS, which must compete with the private sector’s bumper wages.”

In a report from the Joint Committee on National Security Strategy, Rob Crook, Managing Director of Cyber and Intelligence at Raytheon UK, said that the NHS organization holds 20-30 units of cyber security experts, that is more than enough as compare to its technical area.

Steve Unger, Chief Technology Officer at Ofcom, was of the view “there are not enough people in the UK to do what is required for the country as a whole”.

Here NHS trusts are not meeting their own training target. According to the policy 95 percent of the trusts will be trained in every 12 months. Redscan discovered only 12 percent of the trusts has met >95 percent criteria, where a quarter of trusts are having 80 percent of training. It has also found that some belongs to less than 50 percent.