Attacks targeting healthcare organizations spike globally as COVID-19 cases rise again– Researchers

Check Point writes: At the end of October 2020, we reported that hospitals and healthcare organizations had been targeted by a rising wave of ransomware attacks, with the majority of attacks using the infamous Ryuk ransomware. This followed a Joint Cybersecurity Advisory issued by the CISA, FBI and HHS, which warned of an increased and imminent cybercrime threat to US hospitals and healthcare providers. Unfortunately, that cybercrime threat has worsened over the past two months.  Since the start of November, there has been a further 45% increase in attacks targeting healthcare organizations globally. This is more than double the overall increase in cyber-attacks across all industry sectors worldwide seen during the same time. According to Check Point’s findings, we are not seeing as dramatic an increase in North America as in Central Europe, but the increase is still significant at 37%. Of note, Canada reportedly had the largest increase, at 250%. Ryuk is not one of the ransomware threat groups that maintains a dedicated leak site where they post information or data from some of their reluctant victims, and DataBreaches.net does not have any visibility into their attacks in the healthcare sector other than what makes the news. Sodinokibi (REvil) does maintain a leak site, however, and this site has reported on some of their attacks against healthcare entities. Conti has also attacked a number of U.S. healthcare entities beginning in the second half of 2020, and we likely have greater awareness of their attacks than REvil’s or Ryuk’s. Read more on Check Point.DataBreaches.netRead More