North Korean hackers perpetrated a worldwide cyberattack this year that infected computers at a third of Britain’s publicly funded medical centers, U. K. Minister of State for Security Ben Wallace said Friday.
North Korean hackers perpetrated a worldwide cyberattack this year that infected computers at a third of Britain’s publicly funded medical centers, U. K. Minister of State for Security Ben Wallace said Friday.
The WannaCry ransomware worm unleashed in May affected 81 of the 236 trusts operated by the U. K. National Health Service (NHS) resulting in the cancelation of at least 6,912 medical appointments, according to the results of an independent probe of the outbreak undertaken by the government’s National Audit Office (NAO) and published Friday.
The NAO audit doesn’t attribute WannaCry to any specific actor, but Mr. Wallace pegged Pyongyang during an interview aired on the day of its release.
“This attack, we believe quite strongly that it came from a foreign state,” Mr. Wallace told BBC Radio 4. “North Korea was the state we believe was involved in this worldwide attack on our system.”
“We can be sure as possible,” Mr. Wallace said. “I can’t obviously go into the detail of intelligence, but it is widely believed in the [intelligence] community and across a number of countries that North Korea had taken this role.”
WannaCry infected over 200,000 computer systems across 150 countries within days of being unleashed in early May by exploiting a critical vulnerability affecting certain versions of Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
