by Colin Konschak and Shane Danaher
Targeting healthcare in cyber extortion attacks is becoming a lucrative business for criminals, but it is also serious business, because when healthcare is hit with cyber extortion, people’s lives are literally being held for ransom. Hospitals, health systems, private practices, and even vendors who support the healthcare system, are constantly under imminent danger of being locked out of access to their data, their computer systems, and their lifesaving medical devices.
In this latest whitepaper in our continuing cybersecurity series, we look at cyber extortion—how it happens, where the vulnerabilities lie, and how lessons learned from inside and outside of healthcare can help you avoid being attacked or recover more quickly from the hit.
When most people think of cyber extortion, they think of ransomware—malicious software that encrypts data in a manner that can lock people out of access to their data, and even backups of the data. Although ransomware has become a synonym for cyber extortion, it is only one element, and sometimes not involved, as in the case of denial of service cyber extortion attacks. Instead, cyber extortion is a process, and understanding how that process works is the most important step in guarding against it.
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“Healthcare enterprises face all the same challenges that the rest of us do, but a recent plague is one for them to focus on, and that is the ransomware plague. Hackers suddenly see the healthcare sector as a piggy bank.” — FBI Director James Comey speaking at a March 2017 conference in Boston (Chalfant, 2017). |
Download the full whitepaper – Held for Ransom: Protecting Yourself Against Growing Cyber Extortion Threats
