Health care organizations are critical for patients, for both their treatments and the protection of their personal data – any disruption to either can have long term impacts on them, with devastating outcomes. And because of those impacts, hackers are increasingly targeting those systems in the hope of a quick and easy payout, in the expectation that those same health care organizations will be desperate to get their data back and their systems up and running again. With these expectations, it’s not surprising to hear that the number of attacks on health care systems has doubled from 2016 to 2021, with the trend only accelerating in recent years, according to ABC News.
Despite this, many hospitals are still struggling to build proper cybersecurity defenses, especially smaller ones with more limited resources. Says Josh Corman, an expert on cybersecurity and health care, “We’re not yet in a place where we can reliably say the hospital your family depends upon in most of America is, at a minimum, cyber hygiene-level sufficient to fend off preventable attacks.”
The effect can extend outside the hacked networks too. Says Dr. Christian Dameff, emergency physician at the University of California, San Diego, to ABC News about the impacts of a hack on healthcare, “Patients don’t stop getting sick just because a hospital is hit by a ransomware attack. They have to go somewhere. So what this research shows is that those patients go to neighboring hospitals that can be overwhelmed.”
“This is not just a patient privacy issue. This is a patient safety issue,” Corman told ABC News.
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