NHS Scotland has invested more than £3 million in AI technology to defend against ransomware attacks following a major cyber incident that rocked the health service last year.

The national health care provider signed a contract with Computacenter, a IT reseller giant, to supply NHS Scotland with Halcyon software. The £3.1 million deal covers an unspecified length of time.

The new technology have been established by the NHS Cyber Centre for Excellence, which will collaborate to “reduce the risk and impact of cyber-attacks,” according to a commercial notice on the deal.

The new AI tool will work together with the range of cybersecurity tools already in use across the 14 NHS boards in Scotland.

The notice, however, detailed how risks are still prominent.

“While this approach has been successful and adds value, the residual risk is still high due to the nature of ransomware attacks,” it said. “Existing tools by their nature remediate reactively once they detect an attack to contain it, and the risk of data being stolen prior to its encryption is now equal to – if not greater than – the encryption of the data itself.”

NHS Scotland has faced a number of cyber incidents, most prominent of which was the ransomware attack targeting NHS Dumfries and Galloway. All 150,000 citizens of the county were warned by the health board that some of their data may have been compromised as a result of the data breach, and were told to stay vigilant against potential scams.

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The new technology is described as a “specialised, AI-driven cybersecurity tool that defends against advanced ransomware attacks and unauthorised access,” which NHS Scotland says complements their existing security suite.

“A lightweight solution, it requires minimal resources to deploy and run on existing devices, making it ideal for preventing attacks like that experienced by NHS Dumfries & Galloway in 2024, and would significantly strengthen our defence-in-depth suite of tools,” the commercial notice said.