Cyberattacks on healthcare sector rising, 60% of organisations hit in a year: report
healthcare sector is fast emerging as the prime target of cybercriminals. Not just the AIIMS hospital or the Indian Council of Medical Research, but nearly 60% of healthcare organisations in India have suffered a cyberattack in the past 12 months, according to a new study by Sophos, shared exclusively with ET.
Of these, cybercriminals were able to successfully encrypt data in nearly 75% of ransomware attacks. This is the highest rate of encryption in the past three years and a significant increase from the 61% data encryptions carried out last year, the UK-based cybersecurity firm said.
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Offering CollegeCourseWebsiteNorthwestern UniversityKellogg Post Graduate Certificate in Product ManagementVisitIIM KozhikodeIIMK Advanced Data Science For ManagersVisitIIT DelhiIITD Certificate Programme in Data Science & Machine LearningVisitIn addition, only 24% of healthcare organisations were able to disrupt a ransomware attack before the attackers encrypted their data—down from 34% in 2022. This is also the lowest rate of disruption reported by the sector over the past three years.
“To me, the percentage of organisations that successfully stop an attack before encryption is a strong indicator of security maturity. For the healthcare sector, however, this number is quite low —only 24%,” said Chester Wisniewski, director, field CTO, Sophos.
“What’s more, this number is declining, which suggests the sector is actively losing ground against cyberattackers and is increasingly unable to detect and stop an attack in progress.”
Earlier this week, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) suffered a serious cyberattack, exposing the personally identifiable information (PII) of
