NHS computers hit by voracious, data-stealing worm

This comes on top of the lost benefits disks and other data losses.

"The logs show that there is a significant Qakbot infection on the National Health Service (NHS) network in the UK," the Symantec update states. "This threat has managed to infect over 1,100 separate computers that are spread across multiple subnets within the NHS. We have attempted to contact the affected parties and have no evidence to show that any customer or patient data has been stolen."

Not that Qakbot doesn't have the ability to clean out the NHS if it wanted do. Over a two week period, the researchers observed 4 GB of stolen data being funneled to the monitored servers. Because that represents a fraction of the servers used by Qakbot, the amount of pilfered information is likely much higher.

And the government wonders why we're afaid of having our records go digital.