Seth Rosenblatt and Pinguino Kolb report:
Ransomware attacks are serious business for hackers―and often completely avoidable. Hospitals and health care systems, now in the business of collecting patient data as a side effect of treating physical maladies, struggle to keep that information secure.
While there’s no ransomware-specific cost estimate to the health care business, Verizon’s annual Data Breach Report for 2018 estimates that ransomware is included in 85 percent of the successful malware attacks against hospitals. Cybersecurity researchers at Cylance estimated that the number of ransomware attacks tripled in 2017. And researchers at the Ponemon Institute estimated in May 2016 that the annual cost of health care breaches was $6.2 billion per year.
Read more on The Parallax.