Top 7 Healthcare cyberattacks that one should know and thus hospitals can be safe in 2022
As the healthcare industry continues to tender life-critical services while functioning to advance treatment and patient care in hospitals with the latest technologies, criminals and healthcare cyberattacks actors appear to utilize the vulnerabilities that are tied with these changes. This article will discover one MS-ISAC analyst’s opinion on today’s sources of frustration for hospitals and cybersecurity specialists. While other serious infrastructure sectors experience these types of cyberattacks on hospitals, the nature of the healthcare industry’s mission poses exceptional challenges. For healthcare, cyber-attacks can have ramifications beyond economic loss and violation of one’s privacy. Ransomware, for example, is a chiefly egregious form of malware for hospitals, as the loss of patient information can put their lives at risk.
1. Ransomware
It is tough to pay no attention to the current rise in reporting of hospitals victimized by ransomware. It has become such a problem that the MS-ISAC, along with our associates at the NH-ISAC and FS-ISAC, teamed up to host pieces of training around the nation on how to protect against it. Ransomware is a kind of malware that infects systems and documents, rendering them unreachable until a fee is paid.
2. Business Email Compromise
The FBI calls this the “Billion Dollar Scam”. The method involves attackers using spoofed emails (spear-phishing e-mail) or compromised email accounts to influence employees to shift a large amount of capital to fake accounts. Before sending the spoofed email pretending to be somebody from the same healthcare industry, attackers do deep investigate on how the CEO might sound so that sufferers are more likely to trust their scam.
3. Insider Threats
Sometimes, organizations are so fascinated with keeping the path of external threats, which they did not remember to be aware of threats within their very individual association. Insiders frequently have the right of entry to systems and networks which puts them in the ideal place to cooperate with them. Several insiders are just casual, accidentally losing work devices with responsive information, but others are nasty and purposely cause destruction to an association.
4. Data Breaches
Unluckily, data breaches are recognizable territory for the healthcare industry and the sector experienced more data breaches than any other sector like cyber attacks on hospitals. There are numerous ways the breaches occur, employee negligence, with the mainly widespread being credential-stealing malware, and insider’s disclosing sufferers’ data. Attackers penetrate systems through IoT-based hospital apparatus and devices linked to central networks.
5. DDOS Attacks
In the year 2018, Boston Children’s Hospital was attacked by an activist group, called Anonymous. This group launched a huge DDoS attack against the hospital as revenge for the hospital’s participation in a child protection case. The healthcare cyberattacks disrupted the hospital’s system for two whole weeks, causing the hospital to drop over $305,000 trying to lessen the attack. Not only did Anonymous upset the hospital’s network, but the same attacks also caused Harvard University and all of its hospitals to drop internet access too.
6. Medjack
MEDJACK is also recognized as a medical device hijack, it is a type of healthcare cyberattack that chiefly targets medical devices that are incorporated with hospital applications. The chief devices targeted do not well restricted. It makes it simple for cybercriminals to find backdoors to the way in the system and take away the data. As nothing seems irregular, the attack may go unnoticed for several months.
7. Phishing
Phishing is one of the mainly widespread modes of healthcare cyberattacks in which your computers get germ-infested. In this, you may be accessible with a seemingly innocent-looking malicious link. Upon clicking it, your system will get infected at the moment, and it’ll begin spreading to other associated devices. In this type of cyber attack on hospitals data, your private data may get compromised.