THE South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has warned that a cyber attack could be imminent as the conflict between Russia and Ukraine continues.

The trust’s digital director Manni Imiavan has said that staff need to be vigilant.

Russia invaded Ukraine on Thursday, February 24 and the Ukrainian authorities have confirmed that 2,000 of its civilians have been killed so far.

The United Nations has confirmed that more than 800,000 people have fled the conflict, with the majority going to Poland.

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Mr Imiavan said: “There is a heightened sense of something imminent in terms of heightened security in light of what’s going on in eastern Europe.

“Intelligence we have been getting, they believe there could be a cyber attack any time soon so we do need to raise our cyber security profile.”

The NHS was hacked in 2017 in the WannaCry attack which cost the UK £92m and brought the health service to a standstill.

However, Mr Imiavan said that the trust, which runs the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough, was already working on cyber security awareness among employees.

He added: “We are doing a number of things now, we have got the cyber awareness session and training for all board members and that’s scheduled for March 29.

“That was in the calendar anyway. We are doing more than that, we have extended that level of training for all staff so they can access our information about cyber preparedness.

“We have got a range of different tools that we currently deploy, but it comes down to individuals’ awareness and vigilance really.

“We continue to push messages out there to the wider team in terms of being careful and if they are worried about anything then they should report it to IT services.”

This is then reported to the NHS on a national level.

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Health bosses have written to trusts across the country to ensure that they are aware of a possible threat and their systems are up to scratch.

Amanda Pritchard, chief executive of the NHS in England, has spoken about the issue at the Nuffield Trust Summit.

She said: “The second thing (is cyber) – we have written out to the NHS, a lot of it is just good practice about what you should be doing around cybersecurity, but again, this just kind of brings it to the forefront.

“And I think for those organisations, who are still just working through some patching and other things, just encouraging people to make that the focus at the moment.”

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