Cyberattacks on hospitals ‘should be considered a regional disaster,’ researchers find – By Jenna McLaughlin (NPR) / June 25, 2023
It was early May in 2021 when patients flooded the emergency room at the University of California San Diego Health Center.
“We were bringing in backup staff, our wait times had gone haywire, the whole system was overloaded,” said Dr. Christopher Longhurst, UC San Diego’s chief medical officer and digital officer. “We felt it.”
But the crunch wasn’t the result of a massive accident or the latest wave of patients infected by a new coronavirus variant. The influx was the direct result of a ransomware attack, a costly and unfortunately now common form of cybercrime in which hackers lock down their victims’ files and demand a ransom, often millions of dollars, to unlock them.
CONITNUE > https://www.npr.org/2023/06/25/1184025963/cyberattacks-hospitals-ransomware
