In the past 18 months, 82% of healthcare providers have experienced some form of an IoT cyberattack. Of these, 34% were hit with ransomware, according to a paper by data security firm Medigate and cloud-based protection provider CrowdStrike.

An attack last month on Maryland’s Department of Health left it and local hospital partners struggling to recover for at least six weeks. One hard blow was the inability of the department to release COVID-19 case rates amid the highly contagious Omicron surge, and the number of COVID-19 deaths that went unreported in the state for most of December, according to ZDNet.

Back in September, a baby born with severe brain injury died due to inadequate care at a hospital in Alabama. The hospital blamed the poor care on a ransomware attack it was struggling to contain. The child’s mother sued on the grounds that the hospital failed to tell her that its computers were down due to a cyberattack, and as a result, gave her poor care when she gave birth to her daughter. The filing is the first credible public claim of a death related, in part, to hackers who remotely shut down hospital computers in an extortion attempt, reported NBC News.

A German woman in September 2020 was initially reported to have died after being rerouted to a different emergency room because a ransomware attack hit the closest hospital, according to Wired. Government authorities later ruled that there was not sufficient evidence to show that the attack and her death were related.

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