Josh Halliday reports:
The Metropolitan police has been called in after computer hackers gained access to a London university medical database, sending a string of expletive-laden emails to hundreds of its users.
Unidentified hackers sent emails last week pretending that members of the university’s executive board were involved in a “recent child pornography sting” and warned the database was “closed due to Aids”.
The database, which is run by St George’s University of London medical school, is an online directory for doctors and nurses across the UK. It does not hold medical records.
The Met and the university have launched separate investigations into the attack on the Primary Care Electronic Library [PCEL] database.
[…]
“This was an isolated incident, affecting the PCEL server only, which runs independently of the St George’s University of London (SGUL) main server. No SGUL data, including confidential details of SGUL staff, students or partners, was compromised as a result of this situation”.
Read more in The Guardian.