NORTH Bristol NHS Trust has revealed it recently thwarted a cyber attack which threatened around 800 staff email accounts.

The trust, which provides hospital and community healthcare to the residents of Bristol, South Gloucestershire and North Somerset, is also a regional centre for neurosciences, plastics, paediatric burns, orthopaedics and renal.

Luckily the organisation's security team was able to fend off the ‘phishing’ style attack which took place in February.

Phishing attacks are designed to steal a person’s login and password details so the cyber criminal can assume control of the victim’s email and online accounts.

According to the trust, hackers were prevented from carrying out the attack thanks to the work of its “dedicated cyber security team”.

Neil Darvill, executive director of informatics at North Bristol Trust, said: “Our dedicated cyber security team recently prevented a phishing attack that threatened staff email accounts.

“Cyber attacks are a very real threat to the NHS and we continue to work hard to prevent attacks in order to protect Trust and patient information.”

This attempt comes almost a year after the NHS was hit by a major ransomware attack in May 2017.

Around 40 NHS organisations were affected by the attack, which resulted in operations being cancelled, ambulances being diverted and documents such as patient records made unavailable in England and Scotland.

Although North Bristol Trust was not affected by last year’s incident, work has been taking place to ensure it can defend these types of cyber threat.

As the adult major trauma centre for the region the Trust recently qualified for £650,000 of Government funding to further strengthen its security defences.

It is also part of the Cyber Security Information Sharing Partnership (CiSP) – a free initiative launched in March 2013 to exchange cyber threat information in real time. As of December it included over 4,020 organisations and 9,097 individuals.

The Trust also shares information regarding cyber threats through its partnership with NHS Digital.