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The last few years have shown the immense
cybercriminal appetite for attacking
medical targets. The reasons are not hard
to decode: hospitals groan with medical
data; medical data is extremely personal
and fetches a high price on the black
market; medical organisations often think
of access first and security a distant second;
a service outage at a hospital can create life
threatening institutional paralysis and set
against mass harm to human health and it
can seem as though there is no ransom not
worth paying.
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FEATURE: INTERNET OF THINGS
These kinds of attacks have become
popular in recent years. An early example
came in 2016 when the Hollywood
Presbyterian Medical Centre handed over
US$17,000 to hackers who locked up the
centre’s IT systems.
The largest example to date is the WannaCry
attack on the UK’s National Health Service.
Though only part of a global assault, the
attacks managed to shut down 42 separate
NHS Trusts. The ransomware forced hospitals
to turn away patients, cancel 19,000
Baber Amin, CTO Office, Ping Identity
INTELLIGENTCIO
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