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Patients in neonatal ICU are dependent on this precious machine to handle a job beyond the abilities of human hands , and many “ smart ” infusion pumps are now part of the Internet of Medical Things ( IoMT ), and therefore vulnerable to cyberattack .

Emergency and life-critical services are reliant on hosts of medical sensors and monitoring devices that are now all being built internet-ready , and in our current environment are rarely secure by design . Take , for example , the potential effect of cyber threat activity on an MRI or a CT scan . Malware would be able to “ add or remove cancerous nodules , causing a patient to be misdiagnosed or wrongly treated .” The backup generators that every hospital must have on standby more often than not represent an even easier target , as hackers are already familiar with disrupting or taking hostage work sites ’ generators .

Healthcare providers require a strong , easyto-use baseline of cybersecurity solutions to safeguard human lives in their care .

2020 ’ s fast-accelerating rise in cyberattacks on hospitals has triggered warnings from the FBI , CISA , and HHS . This year , the world has witnessed the COVID-19 pandemic pushing doctors and nurses to their very limits as they sacrificed their time and very wellbeing to save lives . While some APT groups swore off attacking hospitals during this global crisis , many cybercriminal syndicates chose this moment of vulnerability to spearhead an unprecedented rise in cyberattacks on healthcare centers .

Threat actors strive for ways to maximize pressure on stakeholders . More adaptive , sophisticated , and overall disruptive threats are intended to encourage fast payouts on ransoms . Once , ransomware would merely encrypt data , leaving it forever out of reach if stakeholders refused to pay up ( and sometimes forever out of reach even when stakeholders paid , as in the case of LockerGoga ). This strategy is defeated by maintaining regular backups on a separate system . Now , the teams of bad actors that

created these threats have engineered a new hook into them : they exfiltrate the data before encrypting it , allowing them to leverage it online against organizations that refuse to pay ransoms .

The fast-evolving landscape of cyber threats has recently been changed by the arrival of extortion ware , a new type of ransomware that makes a copy of data before encrypting it . Such threats are specifically designed by hackers with the knowledge that hospitals are especially vulnerable .

Cybercriminals are willing to do whatever they consider necessary to obligate , force , or scare hospital stakeholders into paying , and in the near future this is likely to include holding patients hostage with the threat of deliberately engineering poor patient outcomes . We advise IT specialists in the healthcare industry to prepare for the fastrising wave of risk to patients ’ well-being . �

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