Quote:As COVID-19 ravages international healthcare systems, cybercriminals have decided to leverage the increasingly dire circumstances to squeeze a few bucks out of the human suffering.
According to new findings from Check Point Software, healthcare organizations have seen a 45-percent increase in cyberattacks since November, which is more than double other industry sectors, which a average 22-percent increase.
Researchers said these attacks include botnets, remote code execution and DDoS, but it’s ransomware that’s really become the weapon-of-choice against healthcare organizations.
“Ransomware attacks against hospitals and related organizations are particularly damaging, because any disruption to their systems could affect their ability to deliver care and endanger life – all this aggravated with the pressures these systems are facing trying to cope with the global increase in COVID-19 cases,” the Check Point report said. “This is precisely why criminals are specifically and callously targeting the healthcare sector: because they believe hospitals are more likely to meet their ransom demands.”
The report added that the primary two ransomware variants used are Ryuk and Sodinokibi.
“The number of cyberattacks on the global healthcare sector are simply getting out of control. And so, the questions at large are why hospitals? Why now?” Check Point’s manager of Data Intelligence, Omer Dembinsky, said about the findings. “The short answer is that targeting hospitals equates to fast money for cybercriminals. These criminals view hospitals as most willing to meet demands and actually pay ransoms.”
Read more: https://threatpost.com/cyberattacks-heal...re/162770/
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