While the assassination of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of central New York last week has been grabbing headlines this month, life-endangering cyber-attacks on the US healthcare industry are escalating at an alarming rate. Once again, the pressing need for both IT and physical security could not be more clear. According to John Riggi, national advisor for healthcare security and risk at the American Hospital Association, healthcare security must now be seen as far more than just an IT issue. This year has seen what amounts to a sea change in the way healthcare executives must view not only their own personal security but also the impact of cyber-attacks not only on their bottom line but also on the lives and well-being of patients.
According to an ESET report, the threat landscape of the second half of 2023 was dominated by AI-generated malicious activity and newly emerged Android spyware. Coming from ESET's "Threat Report: H2 2023," based on the firm's recorded incidents, the report also states that a new economy has arisen from OpenAI API keys, especially for cybercriminals.
LivaNova reported a cyber attack to the SEC, resulting in disruption of the company’s operations. The MedTech company is now in the process of executing its incident response plan and placed some of its systems offline to minimize the damages of the attack.
According to Lloyds, a single well-orchestrated cyber strike breaching a financial services payments system could lead to losses of $1.1 trillion in the US alone, with global losses amounting to $3.5 trillion over a five-year period. China would face losses of around $470 billion and Japan $200 billion.
There has been a surge of advertisements on the dark web this year, with over 700 adverts advertising Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks through the Internet of Things (IoT) devices having been identified. The cost of employing the sinister DDoS attack services ranges from $20 per day to $1 000 per month, depending on the amount of protection the target has.
There is mounting evidence that companies may have been naive in accepting Big Tech’s optimistic assurances that sensitive data can be stored more securely in the cloud than on the company’s own servers. In its latest Attack Surface Threat report, Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks reveals that the cloud has now become “the dominant attack surface”, with four out of five security vulnerabilities observed in organizations across all sectors coming from a cloud environment.
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