There health care as is known, it is a sector highly exposed to cyber risk: especially connected medical devices, such as X-rays, magnetic resonance imaging and microscopes, and wearable devices for telemedicine, are targeted by cybercriminals. This is what follows from the last one Threat report of theExprivia cybersecurity observatory.
The study considered 159 open sources including sites of affected companies, public sites of national interest, online news agencies, blogs and social media.
According to the report, between January and March, cybercrime incidents decreased to 559 cases compared to 626 in the last quarter of 2023. The month of February recorded almost half of the total number of cases (230). However, compared to the same period in 2023, cyber attacks increased by 128%, while incidents (successful attacks) decreased by 7% and privacy breaches increased by 117%. Namely, in the first three months of 2024 there were 437 attacks, 96 incidents and 26 privacy violations.
The report also points out that the number IoT devices connected to the network in Italy it grew by 3% compared to the last quarter of 2023, reaching almost eight million devices. However, the security of smart medical devices, such as wearable and connected X-ray and MRI machines, microscopes and telemedicine cardiology devices, has deteriorated. On the contrary, the level of security of services exposed online improved in the analyzed quarter, which is a positive fact that makes it difficult for attackers to compromise their availability or accessibility, thus avoiding inefficiencies in systems.
The theft of sensitive data it is confirmed in the first place among the main types of damage caused by hackers, representing approximately 56% of the total cases (311 out of 559), although it is 14% less compared to the previous survey (363 cases). In second place is the payment of the ransom (ransomware), which represents approximately 27% of the total cases, which is 30% less compared to the previous quarter. The third most common category of damage was lservice interruptioni.e. shutting down the normal functioning of the network, application or software service, which represents more than 7% of cases.