The Healthcare sector is the most prominent sector considering today’s scenario. The Healthcare sector is predominantly pressurized, covering vast expanses of varied health issues and yet, remains incomplete within its mission simply due to the population explosion and lack of personnel. Words cannot suffice to define the selfless efforts of this sector during this global pandemic. However, the number of cybercrimes has been increasing precariously in this technologically advanced era. The major issues have been Distributed Denial of service attacks, ransomware attacks, botnets, and other forms of known and unknown methods of cyber-attack, siphoning medical records, and highly confidential details of patients.
COVID-19 And Cybercrimes
The juggling of patient care, as well as the responsibility to protect their personal records, has proven to be futile. The accessibility to sensitive information has made the healthcare sector fall prey to cybercriminals and their organizations. Covid-19 has made matters worse; with the onslaught of the pandemic, the vulnerability of the sector has become a global security issue. Hospital yards and vaccine development labs have witnessed the worst possible brunt of cyber-attacks. Currently, the world has been focusing mainly on vaccine development and little or no thoughts were given to cybersecurity, given the gravity of the situation. The economy is highly dependent on vaccines and their development, hence making this a priceless opportunity for rivals and anti-social elements to disrupt the same.
What can healthcare organizations do?
The suggested, viable methods are to introduce insurance plans that cover the concept of cyber insurance. This will help the sector to regain its footing globally. The healthcare sector is undoubtedly struggling to mitigate such cyberattacks with the rise of hackers and criminals of the kind, who make use of this hacked information to make money in the dark web, etc., breaching all cordialities.
Thankfully, there are some groups and ethical hackers who have volunteered to help set things right. Numerous initiatives are also being considered by the health sector to deal with the miscreants. Now, healthcare organizations are creating precautionary methods to ward of all cybersecurity breaches by working in the areas of suitable anti-virus, proper monitoring, regular updating, etc.
It can undoubtedly be stated that the healthcare sector is highly vulnerable to such cyber-attacks mainly due to the lack of skilled personnel to constantly take care of the systems – the importance of which they failed to understand until being hit by a pandemic. To take care of such an exponentially large area, technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and machine learning are the most viable and reliable are the best.AI protects from threats like malware, viruses, ransomware, malicious websites, and many more countless possibilities of crime, being one of the most advanced technologies in existence today.
Mitigation
Some preventive steps that healthcare organizations can consider to fight and prevent cyberattacks are:
· enabling restrictions on the installed software applications
· increase vigilance especially in the areas involved with IoT (Internet of Things) devices, home peripherals, etc. as most appointments have become virtual today, courtesy of the pandemic.
· Educating stakeholders with minute details regarding the security issues within the sector.
These issues when addressed at the earliest, our healthcare sectors are sure to become the best – in terms of service, reliability, and security- thanks to AI and ML.
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