Healthcare

February 24, 2021

Cyberattacks against healthcare organizations have doubled during the coronavirus pandemic, research suggests. On Wednesday, IBM released the company’s annual X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, which analyzed data from the previous year to track the evolution of new threats, malware development, and cyberattacks. The 2021 index includes some notable trends, perhaps the most significant being how many threat actors ...

February 17, 2021

2020 was a bad year for healthcare organizations in the U.S., which had to deal with a record-high number of cybersecurity incidents on the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hacking and IT incidents affected the industry to a larger extent last year, accounting for more than 67% of all breaches and exposed the personal data of ...

February 12, 2021

Some 23 million mobile health (mHealth) application users are exposed to application programming interface (API) attacks that could expose sensitive information, according to researchers. Generally speaking, APIs are an intermediary between applications that defines how they can talk to one another and allowing them to swap information. Researcher Alissa Knight with Approov tried to break into ...

February 2, 2021

The ransomware incident that Netgain, a provider of managed IT services, had late last year rippled onto its customers. Now, Ramsey County, Minnesota, is informing clients of the Family Health Division program that the hackers may have accessed personal data. The government of Ramsey County learned about the potential breach on December 2, 2020, when Netagin ...

January 22, 2021

Trend Micro researches have predicted that this year, cybercriminals will continue to take advantage of Covid-19-related effects and incidents — such as people’s reliance on online purchases and e-services and the increased need for financial assistance — in order to bait victims and steal critical information. Even though new ways of stealing information regularly arise, ...

January 18, 2021

A hacked insulin pump is the last thing a diabetic wants to worry about when life-saving fluids are pumped into their body. Sadly, concerns about medical device IT security are a healthcare reality. Last year, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued more than a half-dozen warnings tied to connected drug pumps alone. Vulnerabilities ...

January 15, 2021

Almost half of all data breaches in hospitals and the wider healthcare sector are as a result of ransomware attacks according to new research. Ransomware gangs are increasingly adding an extra layer of extortion to attacks by not only encrypting networks and demanding hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in bitcoin to restore them, ...

January 12, 2021

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) today revealed that some of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine data stolen from its servers in December was leaked online. EMA is a decentralized agency responsible for reviewing and approving COVID-19 vaccines, as well as for evaluating, monitoring, and supervising any new medicines introduced to the EU. “The ongoing investigation of the cyberattack ...

January 8, 2021

People are being warned about a fake NHS text which is demanding bank details from people waiting for a coronavirus vaccine. Liverpool City Council said in a “scam alert” that the message had been “circulating”, advising people they were eligible for a COVID-19 jab. The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) also tweeted a warning, reminding those waiting ...

January 6, 2021

When the COVID-19 pandemic reached the United States last spring, a Georgia-based medical equipment packaging company worked to get personal protective equipment (PPE) to medical workers treating sick patients. But a disgruntled former employee thwarted those efforts at a time when protective equipment was desperately needed. Christopher Dobbins, a vice-president in the company who’d been fired a ...

January 5, 2021

As COVID-19 ravages international healthcare systems, cybercriminals have decided to leverage the increasingly dire circumstances to squeeze a few bucks out of the human suffering. According to new findings from Check Point Software, healthcare organizations have seen a 45-percent increase in cyberattacks since November, which is more than double other industry sectors, which a average 22-percent ...

January 5, 2021

The Singapore government has defended its decision to allow the police to access the country’s COVID-19 contact tracing data when necessary, in order to safeguard public safety and interest. It reveals that data collected via the TraceTogether platform already has been tapped at least once to assist in a homicide investigation. Its defence came a day ...

December 30, 2020

The internal networks of Lithuania’s National Center for Public Health (NVSC) and several municipalities have been infected with Emotet malware following a large campaign targeting the country’s state institutions. “When infected recipients opened infected messages, the virus entered the internal networks of the institutions,” NVSC officials said in a statement published today. “Infected computers, after downloading additional ...

December 23, 2020

As the COVID-19 crisis grinds on, some threat actors are trying to speed up vaccine development by any means available. We have found evidence that actors, such as the Lazarus group, are going after intelligence that could help these efforts by attacking entities related to COVID-19 research. While tracking the Lazarus group’s continuous campaigns targeting various ...

December 22, 2020

US federal agencies have warned about scammers exploiting the public’s interest in the COVID-19 vaccine to harvest personal information and steal money through multiple ongoing and emerging fraud schemes. The warning was issued earlier today through the FBI National Press Office by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Health and Human Services Office ...

December 15, 2020

More than 45 million medical images—and the personally identifiable information (PII) and personal healthcare information (PHI) associated with them–have been left exposed online due to unsecured technology that’s typically used to store, send and receive medical data, new research has found. A team from CybelAngel Analyst Team uncovered sensitive medical records and images–including X-rays CT scans ...

December 10, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic has caused sudden, sweeping change around the world. The necessary social distancing measures are having an impact on all of us. One large part of society that has been affected by these measures more than others is the employed. While direct customer facing businesses like restaurants and retailers have had to change ...

December 9, 2020

In a short statement published on its website, the agency said: “EMA has been the subject of a cyberattack. The agency has swiftly launched a full investigation, in close cooperation with law enforcement and other relevant entities. “EMA cannot provide additional details whilst the investigation is ongoing. Further information will be made available in due course,” ...

December 9, 2020

A vulnerability in GE Healthcare’s proprietary management software used for medical imaging devices could put patients’ health privacy at risk, potentially their lives. The flaw received the name MDHexRay (CVE-2020-25179) and a severity score of 9.8 out of 10. It affects more than 100 CT, X-Ray, MRI device models in a dozen product lines from the ...

December 3, 2020

IBM’s cyber-security division says that hackers are targeting companies associated with the storage and transportation of COVID-19 vaccines using temperature-controlled environments — also known as the COVID-19 vaccine cold chain. The attacks consisted of spear-phishing emails seeking to collect credentials for a target’s internal email and applications. Targets of the attacks included a wide variety of companies, ...