Cyberattacks on hospitals could be deadly for heart patients: Study

Hospitals need to step up ir cybersecurity approach and defend mselves against cyberattacks for safety of ir patients. A new study finds a direct link between lack of cybersecurity measures at hospitals resulting in data breaches and ransomware incidents and an increase in number of heart patients losing ir lives.

A new research warns hospitals facing data breaches or ransomware attacks can expect a sudden spike in number of heart patients dying as result of cybersecurity threat remediation. study was conducted by researchers at Vanderbilt University‘s Owen Gruate School of Manment.

Cyberattacks on hospitals may result in ditional deaths

Researchers examined number of data breaches at hospitals and death rate of patients at over 3,000 Medicare-certified hospitals. Researchers discovered about 300 of those hospitals h experienced a data breach, which resulted in an ditional 36 deaths per 10,000 heart attacks occurred annually.

As per study, cyberattacks on hospitals result in 2.7 minutes (162 seconds) of delay in suspected heart attack patients receiving an electrocardiogram. Causing this delay is remediation process.

"Breach remediation efforts were associated with deterioration in timeliness of care and patient outcomes," authors found. "Remediation activity may introduce changes that delay, complicate or disrupt health IT and patient care processes."

"Those tasked with securing IT in healthcare industry are walking a difficult line – y have to enable communications and information flows while keeping barriers in place to protect multiple devices, networks and data streams from data breaches and cyber threats," said Kaspersky in one of its research.

" digital healthcare environment has ded risk that comes with n-security trained medical staff accessing and sharing confidential and highly sensitive data. New security vulnerabilities are opening up all over place and, if left unprotected, will be seized on by cyberattackers," Kaspersky ded.

Last month, re was a report that 621 cyberattacks 2019 closed public schools and delayed surgeries as ministrators sought to respond to cyber threats.

rate at which cyber-attacks are reing is at an all-time high. In 2020, se attacks and solutions to prevent those attacks are going to get even more sophisticated, researchers warn in recent study.

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