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New research has shed light on the healthcare industry’s lack of readiness when it comes to defending itself from ransomware attacks.
According to recovery and storage specialists Arcserve, the healthcare industry was the most targeted sector by ransomware operators over the last 12 months.
Forty-five per cent of all respondents to the company’s latest industry survey admitted to a ransomware incident in the time period. And out of those, two out of three paid the ransom demanded of them.
In addition, 45 per cent of respondents did not recover their data in its entirety, while the cost of ransom was found to be between US$100,000 and US$1 million.
The survey spoke to more than 1,100 “IT decision-makers” with some form of budgetary or technical influence on their organisation. The organisations in question employ between 100 and 2,500 employees and have “at least 5TB of data” to protect.
The survey spoke to people in Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada.
Despite the prevalence of attacks, the survey also found that 82 per cent of IT departments in healthcare organisations do not have an up-to-date disaster recovery plan, and almost 75 per cent felt that on-premises data storage was less secure than data backed up to a public cloud.
On top of that, over 50 per cent of those polled believe – in error, it should be stated – that cloud providers are responsible for recovering their data in the case of an incident.
“In the face of the growing number and sophistication of ransomware attacks, the healthcare industry continues to grapple with inadequate data protection and recovery mechanisms,” said Vitali Edrenkine, chief marketing officer at Arcserve. “An ounce of prevention may be worth a pound of cure – but our latest market research shows that when it comes to ransomware resilience, too many healthcare institutions have neither.”
“A robust backup and disaster recovery strategy is critical for healthcare organisations to build resistance to malicious attacks.”
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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