Security researchers from Check Point have discovered in their research that an increase in cyber attacks has been witnessed on Healthcare related organizations by 45% and the surge in figures has been witnessed since Nov’2020.
Thus, it clearly suggests that organizations and businesses serving the healthcare sector are at the top of the target list for hackers, when compared to organizations belonging to other industries.
Check Point Software technologies confirmed that in the past 2 months the threat actors were seen targeting the IT infrastructure of healthcare sector with attack vectors such as ransomware, botnets, remote code execution and DDoS attacks. And among the lot, ransomware was a significant malware threat to hit the servers of Medical practitioners.
When the statistics hitting the companies were taken worldwide, attacks on Healthcare organizations from Central Europe along with East Asia were seen mostly targeted by hackers with +145% and +112% respectively followed by Latin America with 112% increase and Europe with a 67% surge.
What amazes is the fact that since October 2020, the increase in cyber attacks on the IT infrastructure of North America was only 37%. And the low number when compared to the global statistics could be because of an increase in Cybersecurity measures taken by the American government because of the presidential elections held on November 3rd, 2020.
As medical organizations value their patient data the most, there is a perception among cyber criminals that they might get paid more than what they demand in ransom for locking down servers of these organizations.
Check Point insists that all the organizations linked to medical field should raise their defense line against cyber attacks not only working days but also on weekends. Educating employees over malicious emails and deployment of threat monitoring solutions along with up-to-date software will surely help to keep such cases at bay.
