Roche press release:
Roche LinkedIn post featuring Health-ISAC’s European Cyber Threat Landscape Tour stop in Madrid, Spain:
International experts in the field of cybersecurity from different entities and companies have met at Roche Informatics Madrid, one of the most important technological nodes of the Roche group, to address the main challenges in this matter in the field of health. The session, which coincides with the celebration of European Cybersecurity Month in October, is part of a European tour organized by the global organization Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center (Health-ISAC), whose objectives include sharing vital information about cyber threats in the healthcare sector.
The executive president of Health-ISAC, Denise Anderson, highlighted the important challenge that these cybersecurity threats pose in the healthcare field, both for hospitals and healthcare centers and for institutions and companies in the sector. In the case of companies in the health sector, the number of this type of threats has followed an upward trend in recent times, to the point that, as Anderson explained, cyber attacks on business email addresses in the health sector have grown by 279% during this year alone.
Regarding ransomware , a type of program attack that restricts or prevents access to certain parts or files of the infected operating system and demands a ransom in exchange for releasing the information again, it affects practically all countries, including the United States. United States, the one with the most incidents of this type. According to estimates presented at the conference, in just one year, from June 2022 to July 2023, the United States suffered almost 1,500 attacks of this type in general terms, not only in the health field. In Europe, the country with the most ransomware incidents in the same period was the United Kingdom (196), followed by Germany (124), Italy (120), France (118) and Spain (90).
Cyber threats can come from several fronts, such as attacks on employees themselves (through ramsonware , credential theft…), on distribution chains, on hospitals and health centers (also via ramsonware and extortion), and generate critical damage. in institutions derived from data leaks, damage to intellectual property rights, manipulation of sensitive information, disruption of the continuity of operations of a company or an entity, etc., which in turn has may have serious consequences, both financial and reputational.
Behind these attacks also usually hides a lucrative business for the authors of these threats, since in the case of health there is very sensitive data that can be compromised. For example, as some reports reflect, while credit card data can be sold for between $8 and $22 on the black market, and a driver’s license data for $20, illicit trading with a history A patient’s entire clinic can net the criminal more than $1,000.