The head of Large Account Cyber, Tokio Marine Kiln, Paul Gooch, has asked the companies to embrace the mindset—not if-but when in terms of their approach to cybersecurity post the attack on hospitals in London that targeted Synnovis, the NHS IT firm.
As per Reinsurance News, the attacks have gone on to affect the Harefield, Royal Brompton, Guy’s, St. Thomas’, & King’s College Hospitals, all of which were forced to discontinue many of their operations. This attack unfortunately correlates with the claims statistics that demonstrate that ransomware attacks happen to be on the rise once again and that the healthcare industry goes on to heavily targets crime groups pertaining to ransomware.
Gooch also stated that the threat actors have already gone on to add leverage in terms of looking to extort healthcare organizations since they always happen to hold patient data that’s very sensitive, which the criminals threaten to go ahead and leak unless the extortion payments get to be made.
It is well to be noted that the operational effect of a computer system outage within the healthcare sector happens to be incredibly high, as one can observe in the latest attack on Synnovis, in which the NHS trusts that have been impacted have gone on to declare it to be a very dangerous incident because of the impact on the test results as well as medical procedures, said Gooch.
He went on to add that the extent as well as the duration of the effect of this attack is yet to be ascertained but is most likely to be determined by what kind of data has gone on to get compromised, in addition to the backup as well as restoration procedures that Synnovis happens to be having in place. There happens to be sadly a cliché phrase that says not if, but when an organization is going to be falling victim to a cyber-attack, it happens to be the one that, as per Gooch, they would like to advise the companies to inculcate in their approach when it comes to cybersecurity, and hence a focus on recovery happens to be just as pivotal as the efforts that are made to go ahead and prevent the attack.