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- Trend snippet: The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to a concerning convergence of malicious activities and an exacerbation of its existent threat landscape
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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The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to a concerning convergence of malicious activities and an exacerbation of its existent threat landscape
convergence of malicious activities as well as an exacerbation of its existent
threat landscape. Healthcare is increasingly under attack owing to a
combination of three factors:
• Healthcare services are critical to maintain as patient health depends on
them. This has made hospitals a target of choice for digital extortion.
• Healthcare is the custodian of valuable and sensitive information, such as
medical records and vaccine research, making it an attractive target for
data theft and cyberespionage.
• Healthcare has found itself at the center of strategic inter-state rivalries
due to the pandemic, which have spilled into malicious activities such as
disinformation campaigns against the sector.
1.1 A convergence of threats to healthcare In 1989, a scientist at a World Health Organization AIDS conference knowingly distributed 20,000 floppy disks containing the so-called AIDS trojan. As the perpetrator promised a decryption key in exchange for money, this incident not only became known as the first documented ransomware attack but also one of the first cyberattacks on healthcare. Since then, the threat landscape of the sector has evolved with a growing number of threat actors and in terms of the sophistication and diversification of attack vectors. Early threats to healthcare organizations often came from the inside and related primarily to the breach of select medical records (Coventry and Branley-Bell, 2018). With their increasing digitalization and growing value in the underground economy, however, medical records soon evolved into an attractive target for external threat actors (Coventry and Branley-Bell, 2018). The number of HIPAA-reported3 healthcare data breaches in the United States (US) steadily grew from 199 in 2010 to 505 in 2019. While cyberattacks made up only 4.6% of reported healthcare data breaches in 2010, they accounted for an estimated 58% of breaches in 2019. (Seh et al., 2020). More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to a concerning convergence of malicious activities as well as an exacerbation of its existent threat landscape. Healthcare is increasingly under attack owing to a combination of three factors: • Healthcare services are critical to maintain as patient health depends on them. This has made hospitals a target of choice for digital extortion. • Healthcare is the custodian of valuable and sensitive information, such as medical records and vaccine research, making it an attractive target for data theft and cyberespionage. • Healthcare has found itself at the center of strategic inter-state rivalries due to the pandemic, which have spilled into malicious activities such as disinformation campaigns against the sector. These three incentives are accelerated by an endemic asymmetry in resources. Threat actors from criminal groups to state actors are well resourced, whereas the healthcare sector operates within an often complex, vulnerable, under-resourced, and outdated digital infrastructure.