Three of London's hospitals shut down by computer bug

Thursday, 20th November 2008

Written by Francesca Cookney

Patients across the capital have been diverted elsewhere for treatment after a virus infected computer systems at three of London's major hospitals.

Facilities at St Bartholomew's, The Royal London and the London Chest Hospital were forced to shut down on Monday as the bug put their IT network in disarray and left them unable to manage records and admissions. Ambulances were quickly sent to neighbouring hospitals in an effort not to compromise the service while Accident and Emergency departments were closed to all but walk-in patients.

Fortunately, operating theatres and outpatient departments remained unaffected and scheduled surgery was able to go ahead without delay. The virus has been identified as the Mytob virus, a type of Trojan that is spread through an executable file, sent as an attachment via email and which will infect the computer network upon opening, causing Windows operating systems to crash and providing an open channel for hackers to gain entry to the machine and its contents.

It has been around since 2005, and most anti-virus software protects against it. However, in this case, something was clearly amiss.

A specialist team of IT engineers has now been brought in to work on getting the systems back up and running after initial attempts to fix the problem failed.

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