Three London hospitals; Barts Hospital in the City of London, Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, and the East-End London Chest Hospital in Bethnal Green, have been forced to shut down all their computer systems since lunchtime on Monday 17th November after being infected by a computer virus.

No information has been released regarding the nature of the virus attack. Official press releases stress that everything is under control and that the institutions are handling the matter competently and effectively: "The Trust’s well rehearsed emergency procedures have been activated to ensure that key clinical systems continue safely while the system is being stabilised and a solution is being found." This is the official British way of saying "We’re hoping that we can handle it and that the resultant losses aren’t that bad." Stiff upper lip included. The spokesman said the virus was "not malicious", and the infection was "self-contained".

From the above it appears that it probably wouldn’t be all that difficult to get a rootkit into the NHS computer system and steal confidential information by having it downloaded to a remote server. Maybe that’s what they discovered was happening and covered it up?

Aside from Government incompetence in leaving sensitive personal information on a train in a laptop, the Government losing unencrypted disks full of confidential records; or the banks dumping sensitive customer information including account numbers, PIN numbers, and the like, into open skips outside their premises in paper format, it makes you wonder just how secure the UK actually is.

All it would theoretically take is for one employee to open one attachment and every piece of personal confidential and private data stored by all government departments gets into the public domain. Maybe that’s already happened; but the standard cover-up operation has been executed?

Privacy is maybe becoming a thing of the past? What do you think? What security threats would this pose if it were true?