Industry News Home More stories like this... RSS Feed

Hospital infection could have been avoided, report says

A report on the recent internet security incident that left the computer systems of three London hospitals down after bring infected by a worm has concluded that the situation could have been avoided.

The incident in November left 4,700 computers at St Bartholomew's, the Royal London Hospital and the London Chest Hospital infected with the mass-mailing worm dubbed MyDoom by internet security experts.

According to an independent review, the situation was entirely avoidable because in spite of the affected institutions' machines having regularly updated internet security software, some of them were wrongly configured.

"This left a 'back door' for the virus to infiltrate the network," said the report, which went on to say that "urgent measures" have already been deployed to prevent a similar incident from happening.

A recent virus infection also recently left the UK Ministry of Defence's internet security compromised leading to the hampering of email services and internet access, though critical military systems were not affected.

PC Tools AntiVirus removes viruses from your PC and ensures that you are safe from further infections. Visit www.pctools.com to upgrade your protection