Clear tactics, but few easy solutions, for hospitals combating ransomware
"Patients can suffer severe negative health effects if their treatment is delayed, discontinued or performed incorrectly because hospital records are unavailable," the authors wrote in the essay titled "Your Money or Your Patient's Life: Ransomware and Electronic Health Records." The authors are Dr. Eli Adashi, professor of medical science and former dean of medicine and biological sciences at Brown University; I. Glenn Cohen, professor of law at Harvard University; and Sharona Hoffman, professor of law and bioethics at Case Western Reserve University. "There are things we can do to reduce the risk but it is very hard to perfect IT security, especially given the needs of modern hospital systems to have things moving between places and increasing demand for patient-facing access," Cohen said. "To some extent, these attacks are inevitable." The authors cite research that counted nearly 2,000 hospital data breaches of varying kinds b...