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back to article NHS website hit by MASSIVE malware security COCKUP

Hundreds of URLs on the NHS website have been flooded with malware by hackers and - at time of writing - it remains exposed. The security blunder was first spotted early this morning and an alert was posted on Reddit along with a list of 587 pages said to have been compromised on the www.nhs.uk site. The Register put calls in …

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Capita.. wrote it though ...

        You'd assume incorrectly. I do not work for them.

        I also find it amusing that after the site has been up for many years after one incident of this nature that they are labelled as crap. I think you are more prone to hatred of capita than anything else. Do you know when the typo happened ? Do you know who made the typo ?

        The sad fact is humans make mistakes this does not automatically make them crap. Also they've admitted this was human error, they haven't tried to pass it off as anything else.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Routine security checks alerted us to this problem on Monday morning"

    Of course they'd say that. But I smell a whiff of bovine manure. I wonder if the phone ringing off the hook from El Reg and concerned users is actually what alerted them to this problem on Monday morning?

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    1. Fatman
      Reply Icon
      FAIL

      Re: "Routine security checks alerted us to this problem on Monday morning"

      But I smell a whiff of the putrid stench of rotting bovine manure. I wonder if the phone ringing off the hook from El Reg and concerned users is actually what alerted them to this problem on Monday morning?

      Icon appropriate for this fuck up!!!

      As another commentard pointed out, one of the downfalls of pointing to externally hosted web page url elements.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re: "Routine security checks alerted us to this problem on Monday morning"

    So those referenced third-party URLs were supposed to being doing what exactly? If it was something related to site functionality don't you think 587 broken pages might have triggered at least ONE regression test failure??

    Oh, never mind - just some data scraping/tracking that wasn't working properly. Nothing to see, move on.

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    1. c:\boot.ini
      Reply Icon
      Meh

      Re: "Routine security checks alerted us to this problem on Monday morning"

      The pages probably caused 587 errors originally, until some dev looked at it, "Wat the fuck, this is a false positive" (dev also oversaw the superfluous "s") and circumvented the error.

      Happens a lot, you know ...

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  4. Skoorb

    reddit

    Official response also made on, err, Reddit:

    http://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1wv91h/nhsuk_compromised_many_pages_are_serving_malware/cf5wcfi

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  5. This Side Up
    FAIL

    It's not our fault

    'A DoH spokesman said "thanks for letting us know" before adding that it was not responsible for the website.'

    WRONG! It's your web site. You are responsible for it. You can outsource the effort but not the responsibility. You are responsible for appointing crap contractors.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It's not our fault

      Department of Health != National Health Service

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Routine security checks alerted us to this problem on Monday morning"

    So, top-tip for future hackers... Do your stuff at the weekend, cos we don't pay for our IT to have weekend cover.

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    1. Skoorb
      Reply Icon

      You find this in a heck of a lot of contracts with suppliers to the NHS. Everything is measured in 'working days' or 'business days', so nothing happens at all over weekends, bank holidays, Christmas etc. Even the emergency response times measured in hours seem to stop on a Friday evening.

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    2. Roland6 Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Routine security checks.... @zolygon

      So I take it that the public website under went a major refresh sometime over the weekend (probably Sunday evening?) and went live before the "Routine Security Checks" (which I presume normally run early Monday morning) had been run on it.

      Whilst this sequence of activities has a logic to it, the lesson is to do better testing 'offline' and run the "routine security checks" on the new site before it goes live to the 'public' (and retain the current practise of releasing updates on Sunday evening, so that effectively the revised site gets a double dose of "routine security checks"..

      Interestingly, this actually seems to be a masquerade/impersonation attack on GoogleAPIs.com rather than the NHS.uk, so other users of Google API's should review their code...

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  7. breakfast Silver badge

    But it's alright for Google to have and crossreference this data...

    Where they didn't typo, they were linking to Google APIs, which is probably going to be for traffic and link monitoring.

    So that's another thing that Google will be able to cross reference when they are building up our profiles.

    Which was nice.

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  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Well done Crapita...

    ...another partial success. Just goes to prove again that paying for decent developers is a waste of bonus money.

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