Healthcare organizations are once again under attack by ransomware syndicates: Medical facilities in at least three states were hit in the past week, spurring a warning by US cyber-response organizations and underscoring the success of cybercriminals in attacking critical infrastructure for profit with impunity.
Yet, while those attacks make the headlines, they represent only a small share of the successes. Healthcare is not even in the top 10 of the most attacked industries, according to a May survey conducted by cybersecurity firm Sophos. Instead, entertainment, IT, and energy are the top 3 targets, with at least 55% of companies in those industries suffering a ransomware attack in the last year and almost three-quarters of all attacks successfully encrypting data.
The continued success of ransomware highlights the heightened stakes for businesses — and, because healthcare, local government, and other critical infrastructures are targeted, the general public — in combatting cybercrime and bad actors on the Internet.
"We are doing all the things that we have always done for malware, but they are just not sufficient," says Greg Conti, principal consultant and co-founder of cybersecurity consultancy Kopidion. "Often it comes down to, do we have backups? If you have a hardened cloud backup or an air-gapped backup system, then you can recover. And if you are not doing those things, then you have a major problem."
The continued success of ransomware also underscores the failures of multiple stakeholders to adapt quickly enough to the increasingly dire issues of cybersecurity — companies, vendors, and governments have all failed to reign in malicious cyberattacks. The lack of consequences for the perpetrators, the relatively easy profits ..
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