>> $300, even per machine

Plus potentially hundreds of cancelled procedures, including all electives for the next two days, cancelled GP appointments, etc. etc. The lesson is going to cost a lot more than $300 per machine (and as it's per machine that could end up being $300k per hospital when you consider the number of machines they have).

A GP in the NHS may see as many as 70 or more patients per day. Multiply that by half a dozen or more of those doctors working in a medium or large practice, and even just losing this morning's data potentially means hundreds of patients being affected if the server at that surgery is compromised. That's for a single surgery; there are dozens of surgeries in my city alone.

In the NHS, GPs are usually the first point of contact for anything serious that doesn't result in an immediate trip to hospital, as well as for general medical advice or minor treatment, so the effects could be anything from disrupting someone's recovery from a sports injury to losing a referral to a specialist for something serious like cancer or a heart condition.

Obviously if this affects the systems used by the specialists who are actively treating serious conditions, the consequences could also be horrendous: lost records of appointments, medical histories, test results that can take weeks to obtain, etc.

There will, sadly, be nothing cheap about the lesson here. The cost will almost certainly be measured in human lives, and whoever did this should be charged with at least attempted murder.

This could have been a shophisticated attempt to guess how much spare cash the NHS actually has these days

300 Bitcoin equals 524982.00 US Dollar

Edit: Oh, it's indeed USD$300 in Bitcoin that is asked. Cheap!