The healthcare industry was the most targeted industry sector by ransomware last year, according to a study released by Arcserve. The findings reveal that misconceptions in the healthcare sector hinder it from being appropriately protected against malicious attacks.
Key findings:
The study reveals that the healthcare sector was most targeted by ransomware attacks but such attacks are prevalent across all industry sectors. Around 45% of healthcare respondents reported being targeted in the past 12 months.
Threat actors demand high ransoms between USD100,000 - USD1M according to 83% of the respondents. Around 67% of them paid the ransom but almost half of the respondents (45%) were not able to recover all their data after the malicious attacks.
Misconceptions
Alarmingly, 82% of healthcare IT departments lack an updated disaster recovery plan against ransomware attacks. Moreover, 75% of respondents believe data backed up to the public cloud is safer, and more than 50% of respondents believe that cloud providers are in charge of recovering their data.
Prevention and cure
Vitali Edrenkine, chief marketing officer at Arcserve said that the healthcare industry grapples with inadequate data protection and recovery mechanisms amid the prevalence of ransomware attacks.
“An ounce of prevention may be worth a pound of cure – but our latest market research shows that when it comes to ransomware resilience, too many healthcare institutions have neither. A robust backup and disaster recovery strategy is critical for healthcare organisations to build resistance to malicious attacks."