Mackey: Cyber attack risk ‘dramatically accelerating’

Sir Jim Mackey has warned NHS leaders that cyber security is a “dramatically” bigger threat than it was just a few weeks ago, due to rapidly changing tech.

At today’s public board meeting, the NHS England chief executive said the service needed to do “basic things” to safeguard against a “risk environment [that] has now changed really dramatically”. 

At the same meeting, NHSE’s tech committee chair Mark Bailie said the NHS’s sprawling and patchily-updated information systems were “a direct patient safety issue”.

The non-executive director previously told the March public board meeting that the cyber threat was a major area of weakness. Since then, it was revealed that patient data from UK Biobank – a government-supported research database – was available to buy on Chinese auction sites.

The NHS’s suppliers are particularly vulnerable, with a lack of multifactor authentication at the Synnovis pathology provider, allowing the fatal attack in 2024.

An NHSE risk assessment published last night increased its recorded risk level for cyber security to the highest possible - 25 out of 25 – with a likelihood level of “frequent” and impact of “catastrophic”.

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Source:: HSJ, 4 June 2026