How to keep spooky actors out of healthcare

“At the end of the day, the goals are simple: safety and security.”

—Jodi Rell, former governor of Connecticut

I’m a lucky guy. I enjoy a healthy lifestyle. My wonderful wife ensures that our diet is nutritious. I exercise regularly (I need to try the Beer Mile), and we both look to minimize the effects of stress in our lives. Yet with all this focus going into ensuring a healthy lifestyle, we still need to use the healthcare system—hospitals, specifically, to remain “healthy.” It’s an interesting contradiction that, to improve our resilience, we need to visit the very thing we’re hoping to avoid with a healthy lifestyle.

Now, these very systems that we depend on to help maintain our “health resilience” are under attack. According to the Wall Street Journal, 2023 has been a record year for U.S. hospitals experiencing a cyberattack. These attacks disable the equipment used to treat strokes and diagnose cancer and can entail 3–4 weeks of downtime—putting patients’ safety at risk.

It wouldn’t be out of line to wonder why hackers are targeting healthcare institutions. Why would anyone else care about the x-rays of my messed-up left shoulder? Or the MRI of my brand-new hip (works great)? Although medical imagery might not hold a great deal of value for bad actors, the information about us that healthcare institutions collect is deeply personal—and valuable. Accenture states that healthcare data is 10%–20% more valuable than your run-of-the-mill credit card data.

“We can’t defend our way out of this problem, just like we can’t arrest our way out of terrorism…”

—John Riggi, national advisor for the American Hospital Association

Because these attacks can be considered threat-to-life crimes, some U.S. government agencies have begun to take a more proactive approach to cyberattacks. This means moving on from the traditional, reactive cybersecurity approach to a more preemptive strategy to hinder hackers. An example of this strategy is the recent dismantling of the Qakbot botnet by an international law-enforcement operation.

As my esteemed compatriot Jason Blosil has noted, NetApp has been helping to protect what bad actors desire most: data. NetApp^® technology can detect, in real time, anomalies by using AI and machine learning (ML), and it can help you quickly recover from a ransomware event with immutable copies of your data—and much more. NetApp enables you to take a more proactive stance against ransomware with the world’s most secure storage.

Head over to our cyber resilience page and see how the world’s most secure storage can help you be more proactive in your fight against ransomware. We even guarantee it.