Health and hospital systems, already a favorite target of hackers, face an exponentially rising risk of cyberattacks amid the soaring number of medical devices going online. As the WannaCry ransomware attack showed, hackers who expose cybersecurity vulnerabilities can essentially hold medical devices hostage.
In England, for instance, so many hundreds of devices were affected that hospitals had to shut down other devices to mitigate the attack, which prompted health officials to reroute patients in need of emergency care to other facilities, according to an investigative report by the UK National Audit Office.