Barts takes a week to recover from Mytob virus

Barts and the London NHS Trust is still working to recover from the Mytob worm virus a week after it hit the hospital trust’s computer network.

The Mytob computer virus first infected the Barts and The London computer systems on Tuesday 18 November. A trust spokesperson yesterday told E-Health Insider: “We expect all PCs will be cleared of the virus soon.”

He added that, given the trust has 5,000 PCs, "this may take a while." A team from the trust has been working to clear PCs of viruses and get them back on the network over the weekend and beginning of the week.

The spokesperson confirmed that the virus in question was a variant of the Mytob worm, a virus that has been around in various forms since and is used by hackers to gather personal and financial information through phishing. Mytob worms take the form of an e-mail fraud where the perpetrator sends out legitimate-looking messages that appear to come from well-known and trustworthy Web sites

The spokesperson said that work was continuing to reconnect users and applications to the network on a “priority use” basis. An investigation has been launched into how the computer system became infected.

In a update statement the trust said: “The trust’s computer network is stabilised. A team of IT specialists continues work to re-establish full access for all users of the trust’s network, prioritising key areas to support clinical services. This is being done progressively to ensure that each PC is free from the virus and the network is not overloaded as users come back online.”

It added: “Contrary to some reports, there is no evidence to suggest that the trust was targeted as part of a malicious attack and there has been no unauthorised access to patient information.

The trust said that the virus infection had caused minimal disruption to patient care, with no urgent operations cancelled and a very small number of other operations were postponed.

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Computer virus takes down Barts and the London