London, Jul 10 (IANS): The UK's largest National Health Service (NHS) trust has yet again suffered a ransomware attack on its systems, compromising data of about 2.5 million patients, media reports said.

Calling it to be “the biggest breach of healthcare data in the United Kingdom”, the notorious ransomware gang BlackCat claimed to have stolen 70 terabytes of sensitive data from Barts Health NHS Trust, which runs five London-based hospitals, the TechCrunch reported.

The sensitive data includes employee identification documents, including passport and driver’s licences, and internal emails labelled “confidential”.

BlackCat, also known as ALPHV, had given a deadline of Monday before it starts publishing the information most of which are “confidential documents” on the dark web.

“We are aware of claims of a ransomware attack and are urgently investigating,” a Barts Health spokesperson was quoted as saying.

This is the second such breach of NHS data in recent weeks.

In June, a ransomware attack on University of Manchester caused breach of a NHS dataset with information on 1.1 million patients across 200 hospitals.

“The university experienced a security incident that led to the exfiltration of data from its systems,” University of Manchester spokesperson Ben Robinson was quoted as saying,

He, however, declined to comment on the reported theft of NHS data.

“We confirmed on June 23 that our systems have been accessed and student and alumni data has been copied. Individuals have been informed of this cyber incident and offered support and advice to further protect their data,” Robinson said.

“Our in-house data experts and external support are working around-the-clock to resolve this incident and respond to its impacts, and we are not able to comment further at this stage.”

The UK’s public sector has in recent months has faced several cyberattacks, the report said. Last week, the University of the West of Scotland (UWS) said that it’s experiencing an “ongoing cyber incident”.

In June, Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, said it was one of the organisations to face a data breach by the Clop ransomware gang’s mass-exploitation of a security flaw in Progress Software’s MOVEit Transfer.

In May, Capita, a British outsourcing giant that provides critical services for the UK government said it faced a ransomware attack, which affected more than 90 organisations whose personal information were reportedly breached.