Outage of Advanced’s health and care solutions linked to cyber-attack

A major outage across a number of health and care systems delivered by Advanced has been confirmed as being related to a cyber-attack.

On August 4, the business software and services provider experienced issues with a number of health and care products, including its Adastra software which works with 85% of NHS 111 services.

Simon Short, chief operating officer at Advanced, confirmed in a statement on August 5 that the incident was linked to a cyber-attack.

He said: “A security issue was identified yesterday [August 4], which resulted in loss of service on infrastructure hosting products used by our health and care customers.

“We can confirm that the incident is related to a cyber-attack and as a precaution, we immediately isolated all our health and care environments.  This occurred at approximately 7am on 4 August 2022.  We can also confirm that this action contained the attack and no further issues have been detected.

“Early intervention from our Incident Response Team contained this issue to a small number of servers representing 2% of our Health and Care infrastructure. The protection of services and data is paramount in the actions we have and are taking.

“We continue to work with the NHS and health and care bodies as well as our technology and security partners focused on recovery of all systems over the weekend and during the early part of next week. In the meantime those NHS impacted services will continue to operate [using contingency].”

The full list of affected solutions are:

• Adastra – a clinical patient management software that impacts around 40 million patients
• Caresys – a care home management software that helps over 1,000 care organisations
• Carenotes – an electronic patient record software used by over 40,000 clinicians
• Crosscare – a clinical management system for hospices and private practice used by over 70 adult and children’s hospices across the UK
• Staffplan – a care management software that helps over 1,000 care organisations