More Cyber Attacks on European Health Organisations
Cybercrime in the healthcare sector is increasing rapidly, posing huge challenges for the industry.
Data from ThreatCloud Check Point shows that the number of attacks in the healthcare sector has increased by 78 per cent year-on-year, with an average of 1,426 attack attempts per week.
In Europe, Germany proved to be one of the main countries of origin of the threats, with a share of 9 %. In the health sector, 23 % of malicious files were spread via the internet and 77 % via emails. The most common types of vulnerability exploitation impacting healthcare organisations were Remote Code Execution (65%), Information Disclosure (62%), Authentication Bypass (51%) and Denial of Service (35%).
Patient data has high black market value
“Any compromise of our medical data, network, medical devices or systems causes significant disruption to patient care and increases clinical risk beyond acceptable levels. Patient data has significant value on the black market and the complexity and number of systems that deliver our care make healthcare an easy and extremely valuable target for threat actors,” said Deryck Mitchelson, CISO EMEA at Check Point.
Most recently, clinics in Franconia were hit in early February, falling victim to cyberattacks and temporarily having to organise patient care in a non-digital way. Last year, similar institutions were confronted with ransomware in Baden and Westphalia.
