1At half past three on a Tuesday morning, every screen in our hospital went dark.
2A ransomware gang had encrypted thousands of patient records and was demanding payment for their release.
3As the IT manager on duty that night, I had to declare a major incident within minutes.
4We disconnected the entire hospital network from the internet to stop the infection from spreading further.
5Doctors and nurses switched to paper forms, something they had not used for a decade.
6Fortunately, our most recent backups had been stored completely offline, safely beyond the attackers' reach.
7Restoring all of them took eleven exhausting days of round-the-clock effort from the whole technical team.
8During the later investigation, we discovered that the attack had begun with a single phishing email.
9One tired receptionist had clicked on a link that looked exactly like a routine parcel delivery notice.
10Since then, every single member of staff has completed mandatory security awareness training twice a year.
11The attack was genuinely frightening, but it completely transformed how seriously we treat cyber security now.