Hospitals in at least three states are diverting patients from their emergency rooms after a major cyberattack hit their parent company last week.
Ardent Health Services, which oversees 30 hospitals across the U.S., said Monday that it had been the victim of a severe ransomware attack in Oklahoma, News Mexico and Texas, forcing it to take action.
Healthcare is consistently the most targeted industry for these types of attacks and it’s an industry where both vendors have traditionally had very lax security postures and where IT tends to be severely understaffed and underfunded since executives have viewed it as a non-core cost center.
In reality, hospitals are extremely data heavy organizations these days, but the people running them have been extremely slow to recognize and embrace this fact. It’s going to take a very long time for most healthcare organizations to get up to modern security standards and practices.
If only there was a way to take healthcare out of the hands of for profit institutions… 🤔