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A team of researchers found several potentially “fatal” security flaws in 10 different medical implants.
Researchers at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. and the University of Leuven in Belgium discovered vulnerabilities in the software and signals that communicate with implant devices. The software is used to update the devices or gather data readings on a patient.
By experimenting with the bugs, the researchers were able to change the settings on the devices and in some cases shut them down entirely as well as steal sensitive medical data about the patient.
The device manufacturer name has not been disclosed but researchers said the bugs have since been patched by the maker before the research paper was made public. The researchers only studied one manufacturer but added that its products are widely used by healthcare professionals.
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A five-year plan to increase the budget by £8bn a year by 2020 was only set out last year, but now hospital bosses have warned that is not enough. Chris Hopson, of NHS Providers, said the settlement needed to be redrawn. It comes as the half-year accounts for 2016-17 showed hospitals and other NHS trusts were failing to keep in budget. From April to September trusts overspent by £648m - this is despite hospitals being given an extra £1.8bn this year to bail them out following last year's record deficit of £2.45bn.
Mr Hopson's comments plus the emerging deficit puts the pressure on ministers ahead of the Autumn Statement next Wednesday. This will be the first time the government under Theresa May's leadership has outlined its spending priorities. All the indications to date are that ministers are not prepared to give the NHS more money, although there have been rumours that council-run care services could see investment to help reduce demands on the health service.
Read more: NHS £8bn budget plan 'not enough', say hospital bosses
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A test email sent by accident to 850,000 NHS workers has caused utter chaos after being sent from an apparently incorrectly configured email distribution list.
The sender, identified only as R, sent the blank message with a subject line that simply read "test" to a distribution list called CroydonPractices, according to health service workers.
The message somehow found its way to all NHS.net email addresses – and was immediately magnified by thoughtless people hitting "reply" to point out the error and demand they be removed.
Sources said actual work emails were delayed by at least three hours at the time of writing, thanks to the huge volumes of traffic snarling up NHS.net servers. By 11.30am 70 or 80 people had replied to the message, inadvertently copying it to all 850k NHS employee addresses.
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World-leading Papworth Hospital has escaped a full-on zero-day crypto ransomware attack thanks to the "very, very lucky" timing of its daily backup.
It's believed that an on-duty nurse at the heart and lung hospital in Cambridgeshire, UK, unwittingly clicked on something in an infected email, activating the attack at about 11pm on a Saturday night a few months back.
But the malware did not start encrypting files until after midnight – just after the daily backup had completed, ICT director Jane Berezynskyj has said.
The NHS foundation trust had made recovery plans and recruited experienced staff following earlier attacks, but Berezynskyj said: "We were also very, very lucky. Timing absolutely was everything for us."
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DeepMind, an AI research lab acquired by Google for £400 million in 2014, has provided an update on how its DeepMind Health unit is doing. The London-based company told Business Insider on Tuesday that it has doubled the size of its team from 20 to 40 since launching in February this year, hiring several big names in the AI world along the way.
New hires include security and privacy expert Ben Laurie, who is the founding director of the Apache Software Foundation, a director at the Open Rights Group, and a veteran Google software engineer, and former CIO Tony Corkett, who helped the NHS to digitise X-rays.
Former Google Maps team leader Andrew Eland has been brought in to head up DeepMind Health's engineering efforts, while Will Cavendish, a former civil servant that worked on NHS online booking and prescription services, has joined as strategy lead. Elsewhere, ex-GE Healthcare executive Cathy Harris has been appointed as DeepMind Health's product lead.
Read more: Google DeepMind has doubled the size of its healthcare team
