The United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) 111 emergency services are affected by a significant and ongoing outage. It was triggered by a cyberattack that hit the systems of Advanced, a British managed services provider (MSP).
Advanced provides business software to more than 22,000 global customers in a number of verticals, from healthcare and education to non-profits. Their Adasta client patient management solution is used by 85% of the NHS hotline's services. Advanced's other customers includes the UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the London City Airport.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) and National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) are both involved in the investigations. While no details were provided regarding the nature of the cyberattack, it's likely — based on the wording — that this was ransomware or data extortion attack.
The Active Protection included in Acronis Cyber Protect keeps your data safe from encryption or extortion, while the disaster recovery capabilities allow you to return to normal operations quickly if systems are impacted by a cyberattack or failure.