Suspected cyber attack affects major GP software supplier
An NHS software supplier that provides referral systems to 2,000 GP practices has been hit by a suspected cyber attack.
DXS Systems discovered a ‘security incident affecting its office servers’ on 14 December, according to a notice in the London Stock Exchange, but there has been no reported impact on patient services.
The ransomware group DevMan indicated it was responsible for the incident, listing what it described as 300GB of company data on the dark web and threatening to release it on 20 December (it is not known if it has done so).
Its tools are used by around 2,000 GP practices encompassing 17 million patients, according to the company’s website.
The notice said: ‘The Board of DXS International plc … reports that it has suffered a security incident affecting its office servers, which was discovered in the early hours of Sunday morning, the 14th December.
‘Once discovered, the data security breach was immediately contained by means of a joint effort by DXS’s internal IT security teams in close cooperation with NHS England. The Board has appointed an external cyber security specialist agency whose thorough investigations are underway to establish the nature and extent of the incident.’
Despite the breach, DXS said it ‘does not currently anticipate that this incident will have a material adverse impact on its financial position’.
It said it had notified ‘various NHS bodies’ including NHS England for the purpose of investigating.
A DXS spokesperson told Pulse the threat was not ongoing.
An NHS England spokesperson said: ‘We are working with the National Cyber Security Centre and law enforcement partners to support an NHS supplier who is investigating a cyber incident. We are not aware of any patient services being impacted.’
In June 2024, Synnovis, a provider of lab services for a group of London hospitals, was the ‘victim of a ransomware cyber attack’ which disrupted its pathology services.
The perpetrators published information online which Synnovis said included ‘some fragments of patient identifiable data’. The attack caused delays to over 11,000 outpatient and elective procedure appointments and caused significant disruption for GP practices for months.
And earlier this year, an NHS software provider was fined over £3m by the ICO for failing to protect against a data hack which severely impacted GPs in 2022. As first revealed by Pulse, parts of the NHS 111 service suffered a ‘total system outage’ during the 2022 cyber attack, and GPs working in urgent care had to share patient records on Word documents.
