Tag Archive for: Endangers

Surge in Hospital Hacks Endangers Patients, Cyber Official Says


BOSTON—A record year for cyberattacks on U.S. hospitals is putting patients in danger, as hospitals struggle to cope with disabled equipment and frozen data, an official from the American Hospital Association warned Thursday.

Hackers, especially ransomware groups, are routinely taking down medical applications and internet connections, and freezing up patient and operations data, John Riggi, national adviser for cybersecurity and risk at the AHA, said, speaking at a meeting of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. 

“Email and phones go down. Backup computers generally don’t work or have only about three days of data on them,” Riggi said. “We have seen this consistently,” he told the audience of healthcare technology and cyber leaders. 

Healthcare companies, including well-known national hospital operators, continue to be battered by hackers. Services remain disrupted at hospitals owned by private-equity firm Prospect Medical Holdings since a cyber incident in early August. Prospect didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Scripps Health, a large San Diego-based care provider, sent some patients to two emergency departments at two area hospitals when it was hit with ransomware in 2021. The move caused care delays and increased patient wait times at those facilities, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed. 

Since January, the medical data of more than 61 million people has been stolen or exposed in more than 400 cyberattacks, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This vastly outpaces activity in 2022 and 2021

The average number of patients affected in a hack is 180,000, tripling in the past three years, Riggi said. Most of the data is stolen from network servers and email accounts, as opposed to electronic medical records, he said, which indicates hospitals aren’t taking care to encrypt most of the information. 

That these attacks also disable radiology, scanning and other equipment used to diagnose strokes and treat…

Source…

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