Guardian has it here.
Ransom ware has encrypted all the NHS's files. and all British hospitals have closed down their computers and unplugged them from the Internet.
Everything is back to the 1990's except unlike then, there are no paper files to provide documentation.
Though early in the attack, it appears the brazen flaw which Google discovered in the Microsoft rollout was not patched quick enough.
This flaw in Microsoft Defender (shut it down if you know how) releases a trojan attack on your computer if someone simply "sends" you an infected email and you do not even have to open or read it. (Your computer trying to protect you does, which triggers the virus).
Spain's telephone purveyor is now reporting a similar attack.
In a message to a Guardian reporter, one NHS IT worker said: “At approximately 12.30pm we experienced a problem with our email servers crashing. Following this a lot of our clinical systems and patient systems were reported to have gone down.
“A bitcoin virus pop-up message had been introduced on to the network asking users to pay $300 to be able to access their PCs. You cannot get past this screen. This followed with an internal major incident being declared and advised all trust staff to shut down all PCs in the trust and await further instructions.
“This is affecting the east of England and number of other trusts. This is the largest outage of this nature I’ve seen in the six years I’ve been employed with the NHS.”
The Guardian allegedly has a photo of the ransom note....
There is much chatter on webs implying that this virus was developed at the behest of the US Government in order to shut down any (including ours) nation's computer system to silence the inter-connect-ability of citizens to interact during a coup or takeover.
Whether there is any truth or not to any US government financing behind its development, the reality must be acknowledged today that the possibility for it exists. It stares us in the face.
Thinking into the future, we must plan alternative methods to communicate in the occurance of such an event, and one good way (short wave) could be adapted from the movie "Independence Day".
As thinking through this while live blogging, it appears that since we are all probably infected, it might be a great idea to zero out your hard drive tonight and reboot with pure software.
Cheers. Enjoy your Friday night... :(