Hospitals at a High Risk of Cyberattacks – Digital Health at Stake.

Hospitals at a high risk of cyberattacks are endangering digital health by compromising safety.

Are Hospitals at a High Risk of cyberattacks? Yes, they are! Since they store sensitive data and usually have weak cyber defences. Thus, putting Digital Health at stake. Even the pandemic has raised the increase in the rate of Cyberattacks on Hospitals as they are the most attractive targets for hackers. 

When the pandemic hit, a flood of Digital Health technologies flowed into every hospital environment, enabling the connectivity of services. Despite all the advantages, it also increased hospital exposure to cyberattacks thus pushing hospitals into high risk of cyberattacks and putting digital health at stake. The expansion of connected medical equipment, the use of new systems, and the availability of technology have opened up new chances for threats to cross even the most effective firewalls.

Why Hospitals are at risk and need cyber defence?

Cyberattacks on hospitals can have a ripple effect on the entire healthcare system. When one hospital is taken off by a cyberattack, it can jeopardize the care and privacy of patients at any other hospital. They also handle the most sensitive data of the patients which is prone to identity theft. Thus, destroying the people's trust in the hospital. So, hospitals need to invest in strong cyber defences and also to understand the types of cyberattacks and take preventive measures to protect digital health technologies as well. 

Here are some most common types of cyberattacks on Hospitals 

MEDJACK – A specific sort of cyberattack that targets medical equipment that is integrated with apps it is known as medical device hijacking. The majority of targeted devices lack adequate security. Cybercriminals will locate backdoors to the system and thus data theft will be simple as a result. Nothing appears to be out of the ordinary, therefore the attack can also go unnoticed for months. Thus, increasing the risk in medical health technologies.

SQL injection attack – It enables online criminals to launch malicious SQL queries and commands in a database server. They might attempt to insert text boxes with SQL statements thus manipulating the system's data or deceiving it into revealing it.

Phishing – It is one of the most popular ways that computers are attacked online and infected. It is usually a malicious link that appears to be genuine. Upon clicking it, and it will begin spreading to other connected devices thus stealing the data.

The other attacks include ransomware and DOS attack as well. Some of the measures to be taken by the healthcare industry(hospitals) in order to avoid financial and other risks.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) – It is a technique used for authentication. To access the system or an application, the user must submit two or more verification methods. It has been demonstrated that using numerous layers of security rather than just a username and password as a form of authentication reduces the risk of a cyberattack. 

Vulnerability assessment – Cybercriminals frequently target unpatched IT infrastructure vulnerabilities because they offer an ideal opportunity for their attacks to succeed. To keep the Hospital's IT infrastructure secure from flaws and vulnerabilities, it is necessary to perform periodic vulnerability assessments and penetration tests as well.

Training the individuals to avoid security breaches – All healthcare personnel should receive training on how to properly address and disclose security breaches. It will be challenging for cyber criminals to identify a gap in the defences with every proactive person.

Conclusion – Cyberattacks on hospitals are more frequent than ever, therefore it's important to be ready to defend against them. It is also important to recognize a legitimate email from one that contains phishing links. It's also crucial to protect your medical equipment and, to the greatest extent feasible, encrypt data.

To avoid having valuable data held as a ransom, you must also take all necessary precautions to back it up. Thus, cyberattacks can be avoided.