Ardent Health Services, a renowned healthcare services provider, became a victim of a ransomware attack. Over 30 hospitals in 5 states, specifically New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas were affected by this attack. The ransomware attack has impacted operations, causing hospitals to shift patients from emergency rooms. It has caused the shutdown of many of its digital services, like its clinical programs.
It has also shut down all the Epic Program-related services. The company used the Epic Program for storing and managing patient-specific sensitive data. Many of the hospitals owned by Ardent Health Services are facing issues with emergency response systems. There were instances of ambulance services being called back due to the ransomware attack. It is among the 128 hospitals that have suffered ransomware attacks this year. Since 2021, attacks on healthcare organizations have almost doubled from 34% in 2021 to 60% in 2023.
Root cause of attacks in the healthcare sector
Cybercriminals continue to attack hospitals and healthcare services organizations due to the humungous information assets that they have that are processed and stored by healthcare information systems that form a major part of the technology being used by hospitals. Modern-day hybrid attacks are so severe that they can even disrupt major healthcare operations causing significant risk to the lives of millions of people depending on them.
One of the primary root causes of attacks on healthcare organizations is compromised credentials (around 32%), and the exploitation of vulnerabilities (29%) in the existing cybersecurity setup. Emails-based phishing attacks were the third highest (at 36%). It also points towards a lack of awareness of cybersecurity in healthcare since most of the attacks are caused due to human error that may also have led to the compromise of credentials.
SharkStriker solution for ransomware attacks
In today’s high-stress business world, any kind of cyber-attack has the potential to create chaos with a major chunk of operations being reliant on digital assets. Therefore, it is critical to implement round-the-clock support for incident response to prevent cyber-attacks from causing massive operational disruption and mitigate risk to all the information assets.
The businesses, however, face challenges that businesses face to implement round-the-clock incident response. These challenges include – the rising cost of cybersecurity solutions, the widening skills gap, the siloing of cybersecurity functions, and the lack of awareness. SharkStrier helps address all these challenges by offering a one-stop solution for all the cybersecurity challenges, providing businesses with much-needed holistic cybersecurity through their unified platform STRIEGO.
STRIEGO is made to make cybersecurity simple. Through its robust human-led, technologically driven solution, SharkStriker offers a round-the-clock service for incident response that provides businesses with the much-needed support for incidents with the right set of technological tools and expertise that are much needed in the modern world to keep threats at bay. If you are interested in getting incident response services for your business, then get a call scheduled with our expert here.
