To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what resources the Government is committing to the NHS’s cyber security protocols as part of the Government's response to the covid-19 outbreak.
Answered on
21 May 2020
It is not possible to completely eliminate cyber threats and cyber actors have already been seen to attempt to exploit this pandemic. It is therefore critically important that the National Health Service remains resilient to cyber-attacks. To support the NHS and further strengthen cyber resilience across the system during the COVID-19 response period, we are providing enhanced central support and additional funding to help local NHS organisations to manage their cyber risks. This includes:
- NHSX working collaboratively with the National Cyber Security Centre and NHS Digital to rapidly understand cyber security vulnerabilities;
- a rapid remediation programme to immediately fix major cyber security vulnerabilities in high priority NHS organisations, those most critical to the COVID-19 response;
- working closely with the host organisations for the NHS Nightingale sites to review their cyber security posture and help them quickly remediate vulnerabilities; and
- increased ‘boots-on the ground’ contingency capacity for incident response.