The issue of cybersecurity in the healthcare sector has risen to prominence in the last few years, sometimes leading to physical disruptions as in the case of the WannaCry malware, which froze the entire National Health Service in the United Kingdom for a few days back in 2017. While most regarded that incident as unprecedented, a simple Google search will reveal quite the contrary. Cyber-attacks to hospitals – often through ransomware – have grown increasingly frequent in the last decade. Sometimes these are targeted attacks but in many other cases hospitals just end up caught in broad malware campaigns that span over several sectors and geographical locations.

As the levels of technology adoption rise up in the healthcare sector, the whole industry becomes more vulnerable to cybercriminals, just like in any other profession. The projections for the global digital health market are shockingly high.
For the four-year period3 going from 2022 to 2025, market size is believed to be nearly doubling, going from 334 to 657 billion dollars. These projections are a good indicator of the sheer size of the digitalization in progress and yet they might not even capture its full extent, as the implications of the ongoing pandemic have multiplied online interactions exponentially.

This report leverages cases studies from the Italian healthcare system, the Irish Health Service Executive, and the Dusseldorf University Hospital to provide in-depth analyses of cyber attacks to the healthcare sector.