25% of NHS trusts have zilch, zip, zero staff who are versed in security

A quarter of NHS trusts in the UK responding to a Freedom of Information request have no staff with security qualifications, despite some employing up to 16,000 people.

On average, trusts employ one qualified security professional for every 2,582 employees, according to Freedom of Information requests submitted by penetration testing firm Redscan.

Trusts were asked about their cyber, information and data security spending and training, with 159 responding to at least one question.

It found that nearly one in four – 24 of the 108 who responded to this question – had no employees with security qualifications.

However, several of the NHS trusts were reported to have said they had staffers in the process of gaining relevant security qualifications.

This might suggest they recognise the importance of training, or that they struggled to recruit people with the qualifications – or perhaps that they were aware of how the numbers would look amid concerns about NHS security.

Most prominent among these is the 2017 WannaCry malware outbreak – which hit one in three English NHS Trusts and cost the National Health Service £92m, but this is far from the only cyber attack NHS systems face. Meanwhile, there are reports about small-scale data breaches that still affect patients, and about clunky tech in need of updating.

Redscan also asked about training for data security and information governance in the past 12 months, finding that trusts spent an average of £5,356 on data security training, with figures ranging from £238 to £78,000.

This broad variation wasn’t related to the size of the trust: mid-sized groups with 3,000 to 4,000 employees spent between £500 and £33,000.

Redscan added that “a significant proportion” had spent nothing on specialist training – but a lot of in-house training does not cost the trusts anything, and they can also rely on free tools from NHS Digital.

This includes free information governance training, which NHS Digital recommends that 95 per cent of all staff should have passed every 12 months.

The FoI found that only 12 per cent of trusts had met this target, but most were not far off, having trained between 80 and 95 per cent of their staff. A quarter said fewer than 80 per cent had completed the training.

However, Mark Nicholls, Redscan director of cybersecurity, said that information governance training was just one part in the information and security picture.

“People remain the weakest link in the cyber security chain,” he said. “Despite IG training raising awareness of security risks and common pitfalls, you can never fully mitigate the risks of employees making mistakes or falling for social engineering scams.”

More broadly, Nicholls said that, despite getting some extra cash from government for cybersecurity in the aftermath of WannaCry, NHS trusts are still under extreme financial pressure.

This will not only make it harder for the NHS to recruit staff as they struggle to compete with “the private sector’s bumper wages”, but also put pressure elsewhere in the system.

“No doubt resources are being strained further still if you assume that staff with security qualifications are part of IT teams responsible for far more than just cyber security,” he said. ®

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