Ian, we're hoping to cover the NHS cyber attack a little bit on this week's podcast.

Can I just ask you to explain briefly what it's about, please?

Basically, it's to do with computers.

Someone has hacked into the computers and this is very very bad it's known as Mala, Mala Prop, and they will get a lot of bits.

I think I better hand you over to one of our younger correspondence.

Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of page 94.

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray, and this week we are having an election health care special.

First up, you may have noticed that this week there has been an absolutely enormous NHS story

concerning ransomware, a lot of computers which were running old operating systems

being taken hostage, operations cancelled, NHS thrown into crisis.

Now the eye has been on to this story since 2014 and I managed to speak to the eye's tech correspondent Emma Woolockot about exactly what we knew and when.

It was back in 2009 that Microsoft stopped doing mainstream support and warned everybody that even security patches for things like this would be stopped in April 2015.

The government decided to carry on a special support arrangement with Microsoft,

which was going to cost it five and a half million for another 15 months

to just buy itself a little bit more time, basically.

But it was always the case that as soon as that 15 months was up,

the security patches would stop.

And then whenever hackers discovered another vulnerability, these machines would be wide open to it.

Departments were supposed to use that time to upgrade, but nobody gave them any money to do it,

and it just basically pretty much didn't happen.

I mean 2009 is a long time ago now that this has been seeing coming down the tracks.

...