I thought they'd have gained a lot more bitcoin's by now. I'm assuming the number of payments will rise dramatically as we get near some of the deadlines they set for ransoms to be paid?
The NHS can't just lose patients records by not paying.....can they?
If they do not have any backups, then yes, they can.
But i cannot imagine an institution as large as theirs not having backups. There is no way to get past the encryption unless you pay them - as far as i know no-one has managed to get past it
NHS just like any other local health system is not like a company or corporation
It is basically composed of (mostly) independent hospitals, dentistries, pharmacies, asylums (yeah), and similar entities. Obviously, they don't keep their patients data in a centralized way since that would likely be prohibitively expensive. The best analogy to such a system, as to me, would be a banking system which is made up of a Central bank and many private banks which are mostly on their own, i.e. they are free to decide how they organize their data storage and such things
Do you mean there is not regulation put in place to protect the patient records in the case the place gets hacked or burnt down? No off-site backups? that is a terrible business practice to begin with. Fair enough if it was a local business, but you are dealing with highly confidential patient records.