Cyber Risks Emerge as a Direct Threat to Clinical Care

Even though almost every aspect of modern medicine is supported by digital infrastructure, the healthcare sector finds itself at the epicentre of an escalating cybersecurity crisis at the same time. Cyberattacks have now evolved from being just a financial or corporate problem to a serious clinical concern, causing patients’ safety to be directly put at risk as well as disrupting essential healthcare. 

With the increasing use of interconnected systems in hospitals and diagnostic equipment, as well as cloud-based patient records, the attack surface on medical institutions is expanding, making them increasingly susceptible to ransomware and data breaches posed by the increasing use of interconnected systems. 

The frequency and sophistication of such attacks have skyrocketed in recent years, and the number of attacks has almost doubled compared to 2023, when the number of ransomware attacks in the United States alone climbed by a staggering 128 per cent in the same year. As far as data loss and financial damage are concerned, the consequences of these breaches do not stop there. 

There are estimates of healthcare organisations losing up to $900,000 per day because of operational outages linked to ransomware, which excludes the millions—or billions—that are spent on ransom payments. In IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report, healthcare was ranked as the highest c

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