Cyberattacks on the healthcare industry have surged, with ransomware as the biggest threat, a Feb. 24 IBM report finds.
IBM's annual "X-Force Threat Intelligence Index" illustrates how cybercriminals took advantage of increased vulnerabilities caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Four things to know:
- The healthcare industry is ranked seventh in the top industry affected by data breaches, moving up from 10th place in 2019. The healthcare industry was behind top vulnerable industries finance and insurance, manufacturing, energy, retail, professional services, and government.
- Business email compromise attacks begin when hackers spoof emails to impersonate supervisors, CEOs or vendors. The top spoofed platforms were Google (35 percent), Dropbox (15 percent) and YouTube (13 percent).
- Twenty-eight percent of cyberattacks were ransomware, followed by server access (18 percent), business email compromise attacks (18 percent), data theft, misconfiguration, worm or other (9 percent each).
- Cloud computing is a growing source of vulnerability, with 90 percent of cloud workloads powered by Linux.
To read the full report, click here.