Ransomware attacks have evolved constantly and now the spike in attacks is causing a massive concern for thousands of organizations worldwide. Hackers are taking advantage of security vulnerabilities and encrypting data belonging to all sorts of organizations: from private firms to healthcare facilities and governments.
What motivates the ransomware attackers to become even more sophisticated and demand tens of millions of dollars is that numerous firms agree to pay the ransom and not reveal the attack. It usually happens because they are afraid of the devastating social consequences.
Earlier this week, Trend Micro, a global cybersecurity leader, disclosed that a quarter of healthcare organizations hit by ransomware attacks were forced to shut operations completely. The study also revealed that 86% of global healthcare organizations impacted by ransomware attacks suffered operational outages.
More than half of the global HCOs (57%) acknowledged being hit by ransomware attacks over the past three years. Of these, 25% were forced to shut down their operations, while 60% disclosed that some business processes were affected by an attack.
On average, it took most responding organizations days (56%) or weeks (24%) to fully restore these operations.
In a survey of 145 healthcare business and IT professionals, 60 percent of HCOs also suffered a data breach, potentially increasing compliance and reputational risk, as well as investigation, remediation, and clean-up costs.
The good news is that most (95%) HCOs say they regularly update patches, while 91% limit email attachments to thwart malware risk. Many also employed detection and response tools for their network (NDR) endpoint (EDR) and across multiple layers (XDR).
"In cybersecurity, we often talk in abstractions about data breaches and network compromise. But in the healthcare sector, ransomware can have a potentially genuine and very dangerous physical impact," Trend Micro Technical Director Bharat Mistry stated.
"Operational outages put patient lives at risk. We can't rely on the bad guys to change their ways, so healthcare organizations need to get better at detection and response and share the appropriate intelligence with partners to secure their supply chains."
The study published by cybersecurity firm Sophos in June revealed that HCOs spend nearly $1.85 million to recover systems after a ransomware attack, the second-highest across all sectors. The average ransom paid by healthcare organizations surged by 33% in 2021, an almost threefold increase in the proportion of victims paying ransoms of $1 million or more.
