With an average of 626 ransomware attacks weekly on health care organizations, it’s evident that the bad guys are stepping up their tactics and focus where they believe the money to be.
Health care as a target industry has always been somewhere in the top 10 or even top five verticals in almost every cybersecurity report you read. These organizations have budgets into the billions, operations are critical, every employee is super busy right now (that little thing called COVID), and they’re still susceptible to attack.
According to new data from Checkpoint, the growth of attacks on health care make it stand out against any other industry sector. According to the report:
- Health care has experienced an increase of 45% in the number of attacks since November 1 last year. The average across all sectors is half that – 22%.
- The growth is based on the number of weekly attacks – up from 430 in October to 626 since November.
- Ransomware shows the greatest growth in number of attacks, with botnets, remote code execution and DDoS attacks all seeing increases as well.
Checkpoint makes a few recommendations to proactively thwart these attack increases:
- IT needs to be more mindful during weekends and holidays – the bad guys are stepping up attacks when you’re off.
- Keep systems and apps up to date – patching is critical to eliminate as many vulnerabilities as possible that can be used by bad guys to gain entrance to your environment.
- Anti-ransomware solutions will assist in stopping infected systems from becoming encrypted.
- Users need to undergo security awareness training to better understand how to spot phishing attacks that are used as the delivery vehicle for these kinds of attacks.
