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A mutating virus has caused the Ministry of Health to shut down its email system while it labours to find an answer to the near week-long infection that is affecting internal PCs and which “may affect some external services”.
Alan Hesketh, deputy director general of the health information directorate, says no payments have been affected. The ministry, through its Proclaim system, handles more than 90 million authorised payments a year, totalling around $5.6 billion.
Hesketh says in a bare-bones statement, a statement that had to be read to Computerworld because of the email shutdown, that there had been a virus attack and that efforts were being channelled at containing and resolving the issue.
More information would be made available later, Hesketh says.
An internal advisory to staff says: “The virus has mutated, Variant B has arrived. We actually have a way of removing variant A off our systems so we are confident we can figure out how to get this new variant off as well. We are working with the vendors to get this procedure in place.”.
Variant B is described as more virulent than variant A, but the virus isn’t named.
Health uses Symantec anti-virus. It’s understood Symantec was called in to help out earlier in the week.
A staffer says PCs are going to a blue screen around every five minutes and have to be constantly rebooted.
Staff have been told to ensure the virus definitions in antivirus software is up to date in messages from an IT department staffer.
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