Even if The Tomorrow War movie was too dumb to be scary, tomorrow we will continue to be in a real-life, scary war — a cyberwar. Just before the July 4th holiday, a Russian-language hacking group took credit for the largest ransomware attack to date, demanding $70M to unlock the files of some 1,500 U.S. businesses. The Biden Administration is getting pressure — from the Wall Street Journal editorial board and others — to respond. And while this doesn’t seem to be directed toward the healthcare industry, these cyberattacks are a constant concern — it wasn’t long ago when Russian-speaking cybercriminals attacked six U.S. hospitals in one day. In 2020, at least 92 U.S. healthcare organizations suffered ransomware attacks. There is no lack of activity in this area — President Biden issued an executive order to improve the nation’s cybersecurity, HHS’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) recently released a study finding that Medicare lacked sufficient oversight of cybersecurity issues — so now CMS is considering new medical device cybersecurity requirements for hospitals that participate in Medicare, and the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released a ransomware risk management framework to help organizations mitigate cybersecurity risks. One success story in our scary cyberwar is found here, courtesy of a task force within the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) that protected the COVID-19 vaccine supply chain from cyber threats. Maybe Chris Pratt should consider doing a movie about that — we may need a whole generation of kids that want to be movie-star-famous CISA agents.
July 9, 2021 | 3 min read
July 9, 2021
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