Compliance Blog As a Service

The healthcare industry has been going through a difficult phase. While the COVID-19 pandemic overwhelmed health infrastructures across the globe, cyberattacks targeting the industry are skyrocketing. In 2020, healthcare was the worst affected industry by cybercrimes.¹

Experts suggest that this trend will continue into 2021 and beyond. This is a reminder for organizations to regularly upgrade their security and compliance posture during these times of uncertainty.

According to a report, cybercrime has shot up by over 300% since the start of the pandemic.² Here are a few significant attacks on the healthcare sector that have taken place since the onset of the pandemic:

1. UVM Health Network had to shut down its system due to a cyberattack in October 2020, with the system outage lasting over a month.3
2. In 2020, following an attack by Ryuk ransomware, Sky Lakes Medical Center based in Oregon had to purchase close to 2,000 new computers. The same attack vector also hit many other hospitals over a span of 24 hours.3
3. A May 2021 ransomware attack on a California-based healthcare provider, Scripps Health, caused close to four weeks of downtime, resulting in many appointments being rescheduled or recorded via paper documentation since the systems were unavailable.4

Protected Health Information (PHI) has everything a hacker needs to carry out sophisticated fraud such as identity theft. For the same reason, PHI is expensive on the dark web. The growing adoption of IoT technology, hybrid work environments and telemedicine have made accessing health records easy for hackers.