Before you finish this article, there will be 15 ransomware attacks.It’s almost a Every 11 seconds! Our country’s healthcare system is the primary goal. These attacks are devastating, and many hospitals are being attacked or attempted from emerging ransomware. E.g:
- University of Southern Nevada Medical Center Suffered Ransomware attacks in the summer of 2021 This affects the data of 1.3 million individuals, including PHI. Analysts pointed out that REvil, a ransomware organization linked to Russia, is the culprit.
- In August, Ohio Memorial Health System Experienced a Hive ransomware attack After an unauthorized third party accessed Memorial’s network without detection four months ago. Using Hive ransomware, attackers will steal data and encrypt files across the victim’s network. Cybercriminals will leave a ransom note in each affected directory in the victim’s system, which provides instructions on how to purchase decryption software. It is estimated that the attack on Memorial Health affected the personal data of 200,000 patients.
- In September, the Health Department Cyber Security Coordination Center (HC3) issued a BlackMatter ransomware threat briefing, A Russian hacker group believed to be a reconstructed version of DarkSide.They recently attacked NEW Cooperative Inc. filed a payment request of US$5.9 million After the new cooperative took their system offline. However, BlackMatter claims that it will not target hospitals, and HC3 officials said that the details are what BlackMatter claims and may be inaccurate.
The threat of ransomware to patient safety
When hospitals are attacked by ransomware, the lives of patients are at risk. In 2019, a Ransomware attack Making critical systems and information unavailable during the baby’s delivery, leading to serious complications, leading to the baby’s death after nine months. The mother recently filed a lawsuit stating that if she knew about the ransomware attack and its impact, she would go to another hospital.
After using ransomware to paralyze the operation of hospitals and care centers, criminal groups around the world have sought wealth from hospitals and care centers.According to a study Ponemon Institute in September 2021, The sad reality is that the patient suffers:
- Increased residence time,
- Delays in procedures and laboratory tests have led to unfavorable results,
- Transfer to other facilities to delay treatment, and
- The patient’s mortality rate is rising.
Healthcare providers are ravaged by attacks, but so are the key providers that support healthcare. For example, Nuance, a transcription service provider in the healthcare industry, suffered a devastating blow. NotPetya attack This resulted in a shocking four-month outage and an estimated loss of $92 million in revenue.
Andy Greenberg discusses the NotPeyta attack further in his book, Sandworm: A new era of cyber warfare and the hunt for the Kremlin’s most dangerous hackerHe described how during a power outage, a hospital IT staff noticed that the two children’s diagnostic reports were missing before the operation. With only a few hours of free time left, the IT staff found the original archives of the hospital, listened to 40 audio files, found the correct one, and then sent it to transcription, leaving only a few hours of free time. In the following week, the same IT staff found two more cases, each of which only took one or two days for major treatment. In one case, the doctor had to manually re-enter the child’s dictation after rechecking the child’s heart ultrasound.
A sort of New England Journal of Medicine Research It is said that even a traffic delay of less than five minutes in an ambulance will cause a 4% increase in the frequency of patients dying in the hospital in the next 30 days. In many cases, time is important. Mortality is affected. Similarly, during a ransomware attack, when an ambulance arrives at the hospital, the hospital usually transfers the patient to a facility five minutes away, which can be fatal.
Healthcare is the main target of ransomware attacks
The U.S. healthcare system is particularly vulnerable to ransomware attacks due to several factors:
1. Outdated and vulnerable IT infrastructure and operating systems
Forward-looking report, “53% of common medical devices are still running on traditional legacy platforms, which poses a patient safety risk.” Outdated operating systems that no longer provide services, such as Microsoft 7 with Windows Server 2008, Very commonly used in medical care.
2. The data is messy, lack of accurate and up-to-date data maps and lists
In the post-pandemic world, the consumerization of healthcare continues to accelerate, increasing the demand for data mobility, or the demand for health data flow and access. Key drivers include virtual care, the acceleration of interoperability standards, the reality of digital front doors, and the rise of retail medical service providers.
In addition, the unpredictable flow of data into the cloud adds new challenges, such as automatic scalability. This will soon give privacy officers limited information about the life cycle of the data, including who can access it and where it is transmitted.
3. The perception that healthcare pays ransom faster than other industries
Cybercriminals realize how quickly the healthcare industry needs to recover from cyberattacks and try to use this advantage to pay the ransom. They want to pay quickly, thereby expanding the goals of healthcare. In addition to being vulnerable, the healthcare sector has the incentive to recover from the attack as quickly as possible. However, due to the obsolete IT system, many medical institutions cannot recover at all. Therefore, bad actors attack healthcare, believing that they will receive the ransom faster than other industries.
4. Lack of in-depth cyber security training and awareness
Traditionally, healthcare Not paying attention to cyber security in general, Instead focusing on HIPAA compliance to ensure that employees meet federal requirements to protect patient privacy. This is a check-box method that leaves a gap in the organization’s cybersecurity awareness. If employees are not trained on how to identify spoofed emails, bad actors will continue to use phishing email programs.
The cyber security skills gap combined with a large number of attempted ransomware attacks is the root cause of the disaster.A sort of Recent research report, “37% of healthcare IT decision makers stated that their organization is at risk of security threats due to skills gaps.” It also reported that nearly 40% of people have skills gaps in data protection, and more than half (21%) ) Failure to follow proper data protection procedures.
There is a lot of discussion about how ransomware can cost billions of dollars in healthcare, and there is insufficient discussion about how it affects patient safety. To protect patients, it is necessary to prepare your organization to respond when an attack occurs, not when an attack occurs. First isolate the backup from the network and make sure you have an environment where you can restore the system. And always practice high-quality IT operational hygiene, including necessary system upgrades and patches. Finally, at all levels of the organization, address the cybersecurity skills gap so that healthcare can better protect their data and patients from ransomware attacks.
Photo: JuSun, Getty Images
