Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust (MSE), one of England’s largest NHS trusts, said thousands of patient records were compromised in a ransomware attack on diagnostic provider Synnovis roughly two years ago.
The trust is the second to alert patients to damage from the breach, after a disclosure by Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust last week.
The MSE trust, which operates Broomfield hospital in Chelmsford as well as Basildon and Southend hospitals, said 2,380 of its patient records were affected.
Medical tests
The documents involved blood, urine and tissue sample tests handled by Synnovis.
Synnovis notified the Mid and South Essex trust in December, after which it carried out its own investigation. MSE said it would contact the patients affected.
“Records relating to patients who had a mixture of specialist diagnostic tests were affected,” said MSE deputy chief executive Dawn Scawfield.
“Some data is not directly linked to patients, so we are still waiting for confirmation on exact numbers.
“Once we have established who those patients are, we will be in contact with any who have been affected.”
Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said in its alert last week that nearly 33,000 of its patients had data stolen in the attack.
Ongoing fallout
Synnovis said data was published on hacking forums, but said there was no evidence it had been used maliciously.
The company said data stolen could include names, dates of birth, patient numbers, NHS numbers, postcodes and test results.
The ransomware hack of Synnovis in June 2024 crippled the provider’s systems, forcing it to suspend its blood transfusion services for months.
As a result, hospitals cancelled hundreds of operations and thousands of appointments and were left unable to carry out blood transfusions, while the NHS issued an alert over blood supply shortages due to after-effects of the incident.
Russian hacking gang Qilin claimed responsibility for the attack.
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