May 15, 2017•Update: May 15, 2017
By Ahmet Gurhan Kartal
LONDON
The British government defended its cyber-security policies on Monday in the aftermath of an unprecedented malware attack.
However, speaking ahead of an emergency ministerial meeting, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt told local media an anticipated second waves of attacks had so far failed to materialize.
A computer virus known as WannaCry or WannaCrypt has so far spread more than 150 countries, including Turkey, but showed signs of slowing down on Monday.
Hunt told broadcaster Sky News, the U.K. had “never seen a ransomware attack on this scale”.
Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) had been particularly affected by the attack, which froze thousands of computer systems and demanded owners pay a “fine” to continue using their machines.
On Monday NHS Digital said it had posted a patch to prevent such an attack on 25 April and that the WannaCry incident would have been prevented if all NHS organizations had installed the patch on their systems.
‘Clear warnings’
British Prime Minister Theresa May denied reports that her government had neglected cyber-security issues.
“It was clear that warnings were given to hospital trusts but this is not something that focused on attacking the NHS here in the U.K.,” she told reporters on Monday.
May added: “Cyber security is an issue that we need to address. That’s why the government, when we came into government in 2010, put money into cyber security.
“It’s why we are putting £2 billion [$2.6 billion] into cyber-security over the coming years and, of course, created the National Cyber Security Centre.”
Services in as many as 45 healthcare centers, including hospitals, came to a halt when the malicious malware hit computers from midday Friday.
Software giant Microsoft later hit out at the “widespread damage” caused by the cyberattack.
Company president and chief legal officer Brad Smith in a blog post criticized what he called the “stockpiling” of dangerous software code by governments which could be exploited by hackers.
Specifically pointing to U.S. intelligence agencies, Smith said the worldwide hack “provides yet another example of why the stockpiling of vulnerabilities by governments is such a problem.
“This is an emerging pattern in 2017. We have seen vulnerabilities stored by the CIA show up on WikiLeaks, and now this vulnerability stolen from the NSA has affected customers around the world.”
“[Governments] need to take a different approach and adhere in cyberspace to the same rules applied to weapons in the physical world,” Smith added.
