US (Washington Insider Magazine)-According to a recent study, cyberattacks against healthcare facilities, which are nearly constant in the United States, frequently result in higher patient mortality rates.
In more than 100 healthcare institutions, the Ponemon Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., surveyed over 600 information technology workers. Its discoveries provide some of the clearest proof to date that patients suffer from substandard care and are significantly likely to die as a result of the constant barrage of cyberattacks on American hospitals.
Ransomware attacks hindered patient care, according to two-thirds of survey participants who had encountered them, and 59% of them said that this resulted in longer patient stays and a burden on resources. Nearly a quarter of respondents said they caused higher mortality rates at their facility.
Hackers who have infiltrated an institution’s computer networks will typically encrypt its data and extort payment in a ransomware assault. They have become a menace for the healthcare sector in recent years. Hospitals don’t always make their victims’ tales public, but recorded assaults have risen steadily since 2018 and reached 297 reported incidents in 2018, according to a study the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future gave to NBC News.
According to Brett Callow, an analyst for the ransomware firm Emsisoft, there have been at least 12 ransomware assaults against healthcare institutions in the United States this year. However, he claimed that such assaults affected 56 distinct institutions because several healthcare organizations represent many sites.
The Ponemon study discovered that ransomware has affected more than half of the healthcare institutions included in the survey in the previous 3 years.
Health care facilities range from large hospital chains to small, independent businesses with only a few staff members and little to no IT and cybersecurity professionals. A single assault may impede patient treatment in hundreds of hospitals across the country, as it did in the assault on Universal Health Services in 2020. Greater hospital networks may have more centralized specialists, but they are also bigger targets.
Only one published claim has identified a specific person as having died as a result of a ransomware assault in the United States. After her newborn baby died in 2020, an Alabama woman sued her hospital, which had been the target of a ransomware assault. The case is still open.
However, Josh Corman, vice president at the cybersecurity firm Claroty and the author of a groundbreaking report on ransomware’s impacts on health care for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the primary cyber watchdog for the U.S. government, said there has long been little doubt that persistent cyberattacks against hospitals have seriously harmed patients.
Even though ransomware assaults are typically considered to be the work of private criminal organizations, some of the most active hackers behind them have connections to governments. The State Department has asserted that Conti had connections to the Russian government. Conti is a Russian-speaking group that was responsible for a cyberattack on Ireland’s national health care system that caused months of interruptions. In leaked conversations, Conti suggested some links to Russian intelligence.
The United States has also accused North Korea with being behind Maui, a separate ransomware version that targets American hospitals.
