by Ewelina Wołoszyn January 2, 2022
We are witnessing an increase in ransomware attacks across may different industries, but the one area that can cause the most devastation is in the healthcare. In 2021, more than 40 million patient records were compromised by data breaches. Healthcare providers saw weeks of network outages and potential disruption of care. Many of these incidents were the result of Ransomware, a somewhat difficult threat to defend against using common cybersecurity tools. Did you know that over 93% of healthcare organizations have experienced a data breach according to the Herjavec 2020 Healthcare Report? In fact, this same group states specifically, “patient’s lives are at stake”.
Another area of focus for us is the threat against medical equipment and devices. As medical devices become more efficient, they become smarter through embedded software and the systems they connect with, creating a new potential threat. The operating systems that support these devices can become vulnerable to attacks by the very same hackers that target healthcare systems today. Can you even imagine the impact if these systems are crippled by cyber-attacks? People are reliant on these technologies, even devices used in their home for care management. A cyber-attack against those device would quite simply cost people lives.
Artificial Intelligence plays a significant role in defense against these threats, from ransomware to the IoT that supports these medical devices because the threat matrix evolves quickly as hackers’ study and exploit vulnerabilities throughout the healthcare system.
A major effort we have undertaken is understanding this threat, looking at companies that lessen the threat and looking into the future to create a predictive threat prevention system for all of healthcare.
