A number of hospitals in Britain have been hit by a large scale cyber attack, Guardian newspaper reported.
Patients have reported being turned away, while some are stuck at hospital without access to discharge data.
Krishna Chinthapalli, a doctor at Britain's National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery who wrote a paper on cybersecurity for the British Medical Journal, warned that British hospitals' old operating systems and confidential patient information made them an ideal target for blackmailers.
Also, the "loophole" does not work on systems that have already been infected. NHS England described the incident as a "ransomware" attack.
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"Affected machines have six hours to pay up and every few hours the ransom goes up", said Kurt Baumgartner, the principal security researcher at security firm Kaspersky Lab. The Shadow Brokers released Eternal Blue as part of a trove of hacking tools that they said belonged to the US spy agency.
The NHS said 16 of its organisations - some containing several hospitals - have been affected. In a statement, the company said, "We are implementing remediation steps as quickly as possible".
She added there was no evidence that patient records have been compromised. "We continue to monitor the situation closely".
Scottish Health Secretary Shona Robison said officials were convening an emergency meeting to deal with the problem.
Some experts say the attack may have been built to exploit a weakness in Microsoft systems that had been identified by the NSA and given the name EternalBlue.
Beaumont examined a sample of the ransomware used to target NHS and confirmed it was the same used to target Telefónica. G7 finance ministers meeting in Italy discussed the attacks and were expected to commit to stepping up global cooperation against a growing threat to their economies.
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Only a small number of USA -headquartered organizations were hit because the hackers appear to have begun the campaign by targeting organisations in Europe, said Thakur.
Two security firms - Kaspersky Lab and Avast - said they had identified the malicious software behind the attack in upward of 70 countries, although both said the attack has hit Russian Federation hardest.
The ransomware attack is at "unprecedented level and requires global investigation", Europol, the European Union's law enforcement agency, said on Twitter.
He also said that he thought it was unlikely the attackers had deliberately targeted the NHS.
A ransomware attack, which experts believe was developed with tools stolen from the USA's National Security Agency has hit computers in 99 countries around the world.
The NHS said it believed the malware variant was called "Wanna Decryptor".
London's Barts Health NHS Trust, the largest trust in the United Kingdom, cancelled all outpatient appointments at its five hospitals today. In China, official Xinhua news agency said some secondary schools and universities had been affected.
McGary said the hospital network has a contingency plan for tech problems and it was "business as usual".
It encrypts files on a user's computer, blocking them from view, before demanding money, via an on-screen message, to access them again. It appeared as if they had been deleted, he said.
The unprecedented attack plunged the health service into chaos, forcing hospitals to cancel and delay treatment. The cyberattack, he said, could cause a major backlog in referrals.
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