When a large hospital in an urban area is shut down by ransomware, the disruption can be significant, but when a rural hospital faces a similar cyber outage, the impact on patient safety and the community can be extreme, said Nitin Natarajan of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
While ransomware attacks against medical devices don't happen often, disruptive cyber incidents that affect the availability of the IT systems that medical devices rely on are a big concern that needs the industry's critical attention, said Jessica Wilkerson of the FDA.
The Department of Health and Human Service last Friday submitted for White House review long-awaited updates to the 20-year-old HIPAA Security Rule containing modifications aimed at strengthening the cybersecurity of electronic protected health information.
Medical device makers have become more proactive in trying to meet higher cybersecurity expectations of regulators, but many still need to better understand the importance of life cycle security risk management and related issues, said Axel Wirth of Medcrypt and Christopher Gates of Velentium.
Ransomware gang BianLian has listed Boston Children's Health Physicians - a pediatric group that practices in New York and Connecticut - on its dark web site, threatening to release stolen patient and employee data. The practice said the September incident involved an IT vendor.
A network of family health centers, a public medical center and a plastic surgery practice with nearly 180 years of combined service are among the latest healthcare groups reporting major data theft incidents to regulators. The three hacks affected nearly 740,000 patients and employees.
UnitedHealth Group has raised its estimates to nearly $2.9 billion for the total costs this fiscal year of the cyberattack on its Change Healthcare IT services unit. UHG said it is also working to catch up with claims processing and to win back clients disenfranchised by the attack.
Nearly three weeks after a ransomware attack, UMC Health System has restored electronic health records, but the Texas-based public health system is still working to recover other patient care IT systems. Nearby Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center is still dealing with a related outage.
A Texas-based revenue cycle management firm is notifying about 400,000 individuals of a hacking incident it says originated with another third party. The incident is among a growing list of major breaches implicating vendors and cumulatively affecting tens of millions of patients so far this year.
Ransomware gang Rhysida is threatening to dump data on the darkweb that belongs to a Colorado provider of mental health, substance abuse and other healthcare services unless it pays nearly $1.5 million. The group is leaking records it claims to have stolen from a Mississippi nursing home.
General hospitals in New York State must now report cyber incidents to state regulators within 72 hours under new cybersecurity requirements that went into effect on Oct. 2. The hospitals have until next fall to comply with a long list of other security mandates, including appointing a CISO.
An Oklahoma county provider of medical, fire, police and other 911 emergency services is notifying 180,000 individuals that their health information may have been compromised in a recent ransomware attack. The incident affects patients receiving emergency medical care as far back as 2011.
The United Kingdom's National Health Service said nearly all services disrupted by a June ransomware attack on pathology laboratory services provider Synnovis are finally back online. The incident triggered a national blood supply shortage and forced cancellation of thousands of medical procedures.
Healthcare organizations should rethink some of their approach to security, enhancing focus on insider threats, improving cyber awareness training and securing mobile applications and devices, said Ryan Witt, vice president of industry solutions at Proofpoint, discussing findings of a new study.
Health sector entities have yet another ransomware group to worry about, warn U.S. federal authorities. Trinity, a relatively new sophisticated threat actor, is hitting a variety of critical industries, including healthcare, said the Department of Health and Human Services in an advisory.
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