SecureHospitals

Spoofing medical imaging: Highlighting security issues of malware Most of the known cybersecurity incidents in healthcare have to do with data breaches and malware campaigns. However, when hackers gain access to medical data, they could also corrupt it. Potential motivations to do this range from influencing politics, sabotaging research,…

The EVILNUGGET case: The potential for cyberespionage Healthcare data, and specifically medical research data, is increasingly targeted by Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) groups (IANS, 2019). In August 2019 FireEye, a US-based cybersecurity firm, reported a data breach of an Indian-based healthcare website (IANS, 2019). Reportedly,…

The Nansh0u campaign: Cryptojacking medical computing power On 29 May 2019 security researchers published about a malware that allegedly infected over 50.000 MS-SQL and PHPAdmin servers around the world since February of that year. This malware was Nansh0u, which is a cryptomining malware (CERT-EU, n.d.). It is believed Nansh0u is a China-based…

The  WannaCry (UK) and ASP (Italy) cases: Holding medical data hostage through ransomware One of the most well known cases of ransomware is WannaCry that happened in May 2017. This ransomware caused a devastating global event that affected hospitals, government systems, railway networks and private companies, as well as individual citizens. The…

The AMCA case: Hacking and data breaches in healthcare In August 2018, hackers gained access to AMCA’s systems, that remained undetected for almost a year (Whittaker, 2019). The breach resulted in over 25 million patient records to be compromised (Davis, 2019). AMCA, the American Medical Collection Agency, is a company providing billing and…

Risk management and assessment in healthcare organisations Risk management is an essential process for any organisation, including healthcare organisations. The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (‘ENISA’) defines risk management as “the process of identifying, quantifying, and managing the risks that an organisation faces” (ENISA, n.d.).…

A large share of cybersecurity incidents in organisations have been attributed to the activities and behaviour of staff members. The culture within an organisation has a strong influence on staff behaviour and the choices they make in their work. Understanding the character of this culture is crucial information to both understand and improve how…

With the continuous risk and threat of cybersecurity incidents in healthcare, many organisations have implemented various security measures, awareness campaigns and training. The current focus lies on the role of the human factor in cybersecurity, meaning that awareness and training programs are seen as the leading solutions for many organisations…

Any organisation that works with digital technologies and deals with (sensitive) personal data should have an incident response strategy in place. Recent reports indicate that healthcare organisations still needs improving in this area, as plans were either informal or non-existent (Snell, 2018). Incident response is a crucial part of managing…

A commonly heard statement on the topic of cybersecurity is “it’s not about if a cyberattack happens, but when it happens”. This is because every organisation that collects, processes, stores and transmits data is a potential target for cybercriminals. Healthcare organisations deal with valuable personal data, so it is not surprising that hackers…