This is what makes most healthcare institutes vulnerable to hacker attacks

Cybercriminals are majorly targeting the healthcare sector. In the past 12 months, nearly 60% of healthcare organisations globally suffered a cyberattack. According to a study by Sophos, cybercriminals were successful in encrypting the data in nearly 75% of ransomwareattacks. The report claims that compromised credentials were the number one root cause of ransomware attacks against healthcare organisations.
The UK-based cybersecurity firm also mentioned that this is the highest rate of encryption carried out in the past three years. This year’s ransomware attacks also saw a significant increase to 75% from the 61% that were done in 2022.
The report noted that only 24% of healthcare organisations were able to disrupt a ransomware attack before the attackers encrypted their data. In 2022, 34% of organisations were able to stop cyberattacks. This recorded rate of disruption in 2023 was also the lowest by the sector over the past three years.
During this study, the company surveyed 3,000 IT/cybersecurity leaders with between 100 and 5,000 employees. Amongst them, 233 were from the healthcare sector, across 14 countries in the Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific. The list may include India’s top institutions like the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).
The report also noted that the number of healthcare organisations that paid ransom payments also went down from 61% in 2022 to 42% in 2023. This is also lower than the cross-sector average of 46%, the study showed. As per the report, organisations in the healthcare sector are also taking longer to recover. Only 47% of healthcare organisations were able to recover from the attacks in a week, compared to 54% in 2022, the report added.
Cybercriminals attacking Indian healthcare sector
Earlier this week, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) suffered a cyberattack that exposed the personally identifiable information (PII) of 81 crore Indians. This might be the largest data breach in Indian history.

A hacker named ‘pwn0001’ uploaded details of 4 lakh citizens which included Aadhaar number, passport number, name, age, gender and address as sample files on the dark web. The cybercriminal is also auctioning the 90GB of data extracted by him from ICMR servers.
In November 2022, AIIMS also suffered a loss of 1.3TB of data which contained 40 million records. The hackers allegedly demanded Rs 200 crore in cryptocurrency as ransom from the Delhi-based hospital. Security experts claim that ICMR’s ransom call could go beyond Rs 1,000 crore.