| | SEPTEMBER 20228INDUSTRY INSIGHTSFOUR KEY STEPS FOR HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS TO COMBAT RANSOMWAREG lobally, ransomware attacks have been one of the biggest threats to cybersecurity, particularly in the healthcare sector. In fact, in November 2020, the US FBI, Department of Health & Human Services, and Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency had warned about of an increased and imminent threat of ransomware attacks on hospitals and other healthcare providers. This announcement followed a previous attack on Universal Health Services (UHS), one of the largest chains of healthcare facilities in the US that knocked its systems offline. While patient care was still safely provided when UHS restored its computers, the fact that adversaries even targeted UHS and then succeeded at the attack is eye opening. How did we get here? In one sense, this has been a long time coming. Hospitals and health systems are quite unfortunately ripe for ransomware and other cyberattacks. Some of the factors most responsible for the rise in healthcare-targeted cyberattacks are due to the nature of the industry itself, like decentralized operations across hospitals and healthcare providers, and exponentially growing volumes of patient health information being captured and stored electronically (i.e. electronic health records) by health systems.COVID-19 is also in many ways a culprit for these accelerating healthcare ransomware attacks. The sudden onset of the pandemic forced healthcare providers to By Dan Schiappa, Chief Product Officer, Sophos
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