Google Mistakes NHS Staff Searching For Cyber Attack
Google ‘blocks’ NHS staff by triggering cyber defences
By 1 February 2017
NHS staff members are being advised to swap Google for another search engine after the thousands of employees on its computer systems triggered a shield commonly used to prevent cyber attacks.
The website activated a shield for NHS staff that is designed to stop cyber attacks from flooding Google with traffic. It means whenever an NHS employee wants to use one of Google’s internet services, such as search or Gmail, they have to check a box to confirm they are “not a robot”.
Google’s defences are designed to stop large volumes of internet traffic coming from one address and launching attacks that can shut sites down. Such an attack, called a distributed denial of service, was used to knock a number of the internet’s most popular websites offline at the same time last year.
The shields have caused concern among NHS employees, including clinicians who use the internet regularly through the day for their work. As a warning, the health service sent an email to employees that advised staff to avoid using Google.
“Google is intermittently blocking access due to the amount of traffic from NHS Trusts Nationally (this is not being blocked by the IT Department),” an NHS email to staff said, according to the Register. “This is causing Google to think it is suffering from a cyber-attack.
“We are advising staff to use an alternative search engine such as Bing to bypass this problem.”
The NHS and Google are aware of the problem with the health service’s IP address and are in discussions to resolve it.
“We are aware of the current issue concerning NHS IP addresses which occasionally results in users being directed to a simple verification form when accessing Google,” said a spokesman for NHS Digital. “This would appear to be due to the high number of people using our systems and trying to access Google at peak times.”
The NHS is one of the biggest employers in the world and has more than a million staff members.
Google has said it is not purposefully singling out NHS traffic, and that there are a number of reasons its filtering system can be activated.
“There are many reasons why users might see a CAPTCHA window when they do a Google search. Our systems are simply checking that searches are being carried out by humans and not by robots in order to keep web users safe. Once a user has filled out the CAPTCHA, they can continue to use Google as normal,” Google said.
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