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Originally Posted by Stuart
Backups may or may not be helpful. If the trojan hit several weeks ago, and has been silently encrypting/decrypting the files, then any backups are likely to be encrypted. Especially if the machines running the backups are vulnerable.
The NHS, like any large organisation, has old and new hardware. When I worked for my old hospital (back in the early 90s), most of the administration was done on PCs of various vintages, but the patient records were only available on terminals that had been installed in the 70s. Terminals that I am told were in use until the early 2000s when the hospital was demolished and replaced with a state of the art new one. Now, we do have a system in place where things like X rays are available electronically, and our GP (at least) is registered with the NHS Epatient system, so we can book appointments and request repeat prescriptions through the web, iPhone or Android app.
It's not just public organisations that suffer it. Look at the problems experienced by customers of certain banks. Problems caused by the fact that although the bank's customer facing hardware and software is relatively new, it's using backend servers that were installed in the 80s, or in some cases, the 70s.
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I was talking to a friend some time ago who is involved with bank IT systems.
Whilst referring to cashpoint machines, he said that the problem was that the original software was written in the 60's or 70's and had been updated as time went by. This meant that a lot of today's IT workers have the problem of working with ancient programmes that they may not fully understand.
When I asked why they didn't simply ask the original programmers, he replied that they were probably dead!
Perhaps this is also the case with other IT systems in various organisations and this is contributing to the problems that we are now experiencing??