Hospitals see surge in hacks amid coronavirus vaccine rollout: RPT

Yahoo Finance’s Zack Guzman, Akiko Fujita, and Dan Howley discuss hacking amid COVID-19.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: Sticking with the health care space though, of course, we've been talking about the overloaded staffs at many of the hospitals across the US and really around the world. And right now, many of those hospitals battling a new problem here in 2021, which is something that we saw play out in the latter half of 2020, as well. That would be the cybersecurity threats many of these hospitals are facing.

And for more on that, I want to bring on Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley, who has the details of increased hackings on hospitals. Dan?

DAN HOWLEY: That's right. Yeah, according to Checkpoint Security Software, basically what we're seeing is a huge jump in the amount of hospitals that are being attacked. In North America alone there was a 37% increase in November, as far as hospitals that are being hit with different types of Malware. As far as internationally, we're seeing central Europe hit with 145% increase, as well as East Asia with 137% increase. Individual countries-- Canada saw 250% jump, and Germany saw a 220% jump.

And what's going on here is there's different vectors of attack. So whether or not it's Botnets-- those are kind of zombie machines that are being used to attack individual hospitals, or more worryingly, Ransomware attacks. And that's where an attacker uses some kind of email to inject malware into a larger hospital system and then encrypt patient records, or something along those lines, and demand a ransom paid, usually in Bitcoin, to then provide the decryption keys to these hospitals.

And you know, just to give you an idea of how big of a deal this can be, we've seen the hospitals from New York, Vermont, Oregon all impacted. This has been going on before Covid. But it does add to the kind of issues that we're seeing just because of the vaccination efforts and the surge in people who are being infected.

And then just anecdotally, as far as the kind of problems that these kinds of hacks can cause, there was a report of a woman in Germany who sadly died because she was facing a medical emergency, and the hospital that she was originally trying to get to, or be transported to, the closest one, was facing a cyber attack at that point. And so they couldn't admit her. So they had to take her to a more distant hospital. And as a result, she ended up passing. So this is very much an issue of life and death in certain situations when these hospitals are hit by hackers.

AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah, and Dan, we've been talking so much about the digital acceleration, the positives of that throughout the pandemic. This is, of course, the other side of it, largely because so much information now online are more prone to hacks. Thanks so much for bringing us that story.