Case Studies

Boston Children’s Hospital (US): Hacktivism and DDoS attacks In 2014, the Boston Children’s Hospital (located in the US) was targeted by a DDoS attack. A DDoS attack is a Distributed Denial of…

The UnityPoint Health breach: Phishing for sensitive information On 31 May 2018, UnityPoint Health, a US-based healthcare provider organisation, discovered their business email system was…

The Barbie case (The Netherlands): GDPR and the mishandling of patient information Not all security breaches stem from sources outside of healthcare organisations, they can also stem from within…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…