US hospitals are being targeted with ransomware like the Trickbot trojan amid the COVID second wave, according to a report yesterday by the FBI and others. This could mean thousands of more preventable deaths if healthcare organizations don’t protect themselves adequately from cyberattacks.
Further, this isn't an isolated trend in the US -- it's happening around the world in places like France, Canada, Germany, and more.
TrickBot started out as a banking trojan, but we have seen them increasingly attack other industries. With recent attacks against healthcare organizations around the world being highly profitable for ransomware gangs, it is no surprise that TrickBot is going after U.S. healthcare organizations.
When combined with spam and phishing filters on company email systems, the majority of these attacks can be stopped before they start.
Nevertheless, the timing of this wave of attacks couldn't be worse, as many places are going into their second or third wave of COVID-19 infections.
We have already seen examples of patients dying as a result of recent ransomware attacks against healthcare organizations, and we can likely expect to see more deaths as medical facilities see an influx of patients at the same time systems are going down due to cyberattacks.
Patient care must be prioritized in these attacks, meaning that keeping life-saving equipment operational, and a fallback plan for communication that normally occurs electronically, are the priorities when bracing for this wave of attacks.
Many pieces of medical equipment are internet-connected, but any that don't need to be in order to maintain operation should be disconnected from the network when the connection is not explicitly required.
