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- Trend snippet: Criminals and state actors are joining forces against healthcare with varying motives and agendas
Trends in Security Information
The HSD Trendmonitor is designed to provide access to relevant content on various subjects in the safety and security domain, to identify relevant developments and to connect knowledge and organisations. The safety and security domain encompasses a vast number of subjects. Four relevant taxonomies (type of threat or opportunity, victim, source of threat and domain of application) have been constructed in order to visualize all of these subjects. The taxonomies and related category descriptions have been carefully composed according to other taxonomies, European and international standards and our own expertise.
In order to identify safety and security related trends, relevant reports and HSD news articles are continuously scanned, analysed and classified by hand according to the four taxonomies. This results in a wide array of observations, which we call ‘Trend Snippets’. Multiple Trend Snippets combined can provide insights into safety and security trends. The size of the circles shows the relative weight of the topic, the filters can be used to further select the most relevant content for you. If you have an addition, question or remark, drop us a line at info@securitydelta.nl.
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Criminals and state actors are joining forces against healthcare with varying motives and agendas
Attacks on healthcare are low-risk, high-reward crimes. Acting with near impunity, criminals and state actors are joining forces against healthcare with varying motives and agendas. • Attacking healthcare is a lucrative and global business. Attacks on healthcare are a global phenomenon, regardless of whether the intent is to hold healthcare providers to ransom, steal medical records and intellectual property, or erode public trust. As healthcare organizations are gatekeepers of sensitive information, the data they hold makes the sector a highly profitable target for both cybercriminals, state actors and state-sponsored actors. • Attacking healthcare serves geopolitical interests. Not only does attacking healthcare provide state or state-sponsored threat actors with an attractive target for data theft regarding vaccine research and private medical records, but cyberattacks also weaken geopolitical rivals. • Attacks on healthcare are widely under -reported. When targeted, many organizations don’t know what to report and how to do so, notably because they don’t have the necessary cybersecurity capability. Moreover,the fear of facing liabilities or reputational loss is hampering reporting as is a lack of faith that reporting will lead to prosecution. This underreporting prevents a comprehensive evaluation of the true scale of the threat. • Threat actors enjoy near impunity, as attribution and prosecution lag behind. The law enforcement and prosecution rate of perpetrators of cyberattacks on healthcare is extremely low. This stems notably from the under-reporting of attacks, from the lack of resources in law enforcement and the judiciary, and from shortfalls in attribution. In addition, opportunities available by means of legal instruments, such as investigative cooperation, and enforcement mechanisms, such as sanctions, are rarely used systematically in the case of attacks against healthcare and are rendered still more complex by geopolitical agendas in the case of state or state-sponsored attacks. • There are today no transparent and independent mechanisms to track accountability in cyberspace. Various actors bear responsibilities to protect healthcare. When analysing an attack, there is no standard process to track who is responsible for what action or to hold them to account, let alone any systematic documentation or transparency on how malicious behaviors are violating laws, norms and principles.