88 of Hospitals and Other Health Care Organizations Faced Cyberattacks Last Year The Messenger

pHospitals clinics and other health care organizations are facing a barrage of cyberattacks and struggling to provide normal services amid computer outages and loss of important files according to newly published research by Proofpoint an email security firmppNearly 90 of health care organizations have experienced at least one cyberattack in the past year Proofpoint said in a report published on Wednesday In the past two years more than half of organizations reported suffering an average of four ransomware attacks and 68 of those respondents said the attacks negatively impacted patient safety and careppProofpoints report based on surveys of more than 650 IT and cybersecurity experts at US health care organizations contains a host of worrisome findings that underscore the health care sectors continuing vulnerability to basic attack techniques It comes as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency tries to direct more aid to small rural and underfunded hospitals that are buckling under relentless cyberattacksppThese campaigns are increasingly draining health care organizations resources as they scramble to find workarounds to their traditional technology and continue providing services The cost of the time spent mitigating the attacks effects on patient care increased 50 between 2022 and 2023 going from roughly 660000 to 1 millionppWhen a ransomware attack shuts down a hospitals computer network the effects are immediate and wideranging At a congressional hearing in September Stephen Leffler the president and chief operating officer of the University of Vermont Medical Center described how an October 2020 ransomware attack plunged his facility into crisis Older doctors had to teach younger physicians how to work with paper records for 28 days while National Guard personnel helped the IT department wipe and reconfigure every computer in their network in an aroundtheclock effort With their internetbased phone system offline Leffler said We literally went to Best Buy and bought every walkietalkie they hadppIve been an emergency medicine doctor for 30 years Leffler told lawmakers Ive been a hospital president for four years The cyberattack was much harder than the pandemic by farppWhile fewer health care organizations paid ransoms in 2023 40 than in 2022 51 the average ransom payment paid by health care organizations increased by nearly 30 to almost 1 million according to the Proofpoint reportppHealth care faces a range of complicated threats beyond ransomware The industrys reliance on medical device vendors and health care software companies exposes it to what are known as supplychain attacks where hackers breach a company to get access to that companys customers In the past two years Proofpoint found 64 of respondents reported experiencing an average of four supplychain attacks and 77 of those organizations said the attacks affected patient careppAt half of the organizations that experienced supplychain attacks the disruptions led to more severe illnesses because of delayed proceduresp