NHS National Services Scotland acquires AI anti-malware platform

NHS National Services Scotland (NSS) has awarded Computacenter a £2.6 million contract for the provision of an AI anti-ransomware platform.

The IT reseller will supply the Halcyon platform – from the company of the same name – to support the operation of the Cyber Centre of Excellence (CCoE) for Scotland’s health services.

According to the contract award notice , it is aimed at dealing with the residual risk of ransomware attacks.

It says that Halcyon defences against advanced ransomware attacks and unauthorised access to networks, while complement existing security measures. It can run on existing devices and has the potential to significantly strengthen NSS’s existing suite of cyber security tools.

The system is said to identify suspicious activity early in an attack then then proactively disrupt attackers at every stage. If an attacker gains a foothold, it can prevent execution and detect data exfiltration attempts, and if needed it can recover data without relying on back-ups.

The notice says the risk of data being stolen by ransomware criminals prior to encryption is now equal to, if not greater than, the encryption of the data itself.

Anxieties around ransomware have been high in Scotland’s health service since NHS Dumfries was hit by a serious attack by the INC Ransom gang in March of last year, which was followed by the publication of some of the data stolen .