Cybersecurity Incident
Published: 18/08/2022
In early August we were alerted to a major outage of national healthcare systems caused by cybersecurity incident. Please read on for further details and our response.
In early August we were informed of a major outage across multiple healthcare systems (Advanced), which impacts millions of services across the country, including the NHS and Bluebird Care.
As you may have seen in the news, Advanced recently experienced a disruption to their systems and have since determined that to be the result of a cybersecurity incident caused by ransomware.
In response, they immediately took action to mitigate any further risk to their customer’s critical systems and isolated all of our Health and Care environments. As a result, there has been a temporary loss in service to infrastructure hosting products used by their Health & Care customers, including Bluebird Care.
Since these systems were isolated, no further issues have been detected. They have reassured us that their internal teams are working diligently alongside leading third-party forensic partners to investigate and have taken steps to further fortify their security posture. They are also rebuilding impacted systems in a separate and secure environment, though we still have no timeframe as to when the systems will go live again.
As a consequence, we are operating within the confinements of our contingency measures, which means building our rota’s from scratch manually each day. It also means we are regrettably unable to issue the printout (paper based) weekly schedule. However, we recommend our customers get signed up with a free OpenPASS account which is a mobile phone app whereby you can receive live updates of the rota schedule. Our invoicing process has also changed frequency to monthly.
If a viable solution cannot be offered by Advanced within a reasonable timeframe, we will look to switch suppliers in order to get our full system back online as soon as possible. We'd like to thank all of our customers for their patience and understanding at this difficult time.
