Healthcare · Security & Resilience
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15 articles · Healthcare · Security & Resilience
Articles
Week of 9 March 2026
Stryker’s wipe made a supplier’s admin console a hospital supply risk
The attack on Stryker reportedly turned the company’s own device-management tools into an eraser, with no ransom and no patient data at stake. It reached hospitals through orders and shipments, a dependency most vendor risk reviews never look at.
Week of 10 March 2025
Medusa showed that a clinic’s remote-support software is its ransomware attack surface
The March 2025 Medusa warning read like a shopping list of the remote-access tools hospitals and clinics rely on every day. Stopping attacks like it means governing those tools at three moments: getting in, moving around and switching off defenses.
Week of 23 December 2024
The HIPAA Security Rule proposal’s hardest line was a 72-hour restore
HHS proposed turning HIPAA’s flexible security safeguards into firm requirements. Most were controls hospitals already had or paperwork they could build. One was different: being able to restore key systems within 72 hours, which needed clinical planning, tested capacity and real money.
Week of 29 April 2024
Why Change Healthcare’s missing MFA was a deal-integration failure
UnitedHealth’s testimony traced the Change Healthcare attack to a remote-access portal with no second login check, about sixteen months after the deal closed. For health care buyers, inherited internet-facing doors belong in the deal terms, the first weeks after closing and the boardroom.
Week of 19 February 2024
How Change Healthcare’s customers decided whether to pull the plug, and when to plug back in
Ransomware at the largest US claims clearinghouse left every connected hospital, practice and pharmacy with a hard call, fast. Pulling the plug was easy. Knowing what to unplug, and what proof to demand before plugging back in, took homework few had done.
Week of 23 October 2023
How a troubleshooting file handed over an administrator’s session in the Okta breach
Attackers inside Okta’s support system reused live sign-in tokens found in files customers had uploaded for troubleshooting. Health systems send vendors logs and screenshots daily, and each one’s risk depends on what it contains, what HIPAA says it is, and how long it stays usable.
Week of 23 January 2023
Hive’s takedown removed a supplier, not the ransomware market
The FBI’s covert takedown of the Hive ransomware group spared many victims, hospitals among them, from paying. But it removed one criminal brand. The hired attackers, their methods and the hospital weaknesses they exploited were untouched, and each needed a different response.
Week of 14 November 2022
What Hive’s victims gained by calling the FBI early
The FBI had held Hive ransomware’s decryption keys for months when federal agencies warned health care about the gang, and victims who reported got them. Health systems should decide now when to call, what to share and how reporting fits their other deadlines.
Week of 31 October 2022
How hospitals spent the OpenSSL week waiting for ‘not affected’
A week’s warning of a critical OpenSSL flaw should have made the answer easy. For health systems, it hinged on suppliers saying their products were not affected, and few hospitals could get that reassurance quickly, in usable form, or at all.
Article · 21 June 2022 · Simon Malian
The Rising Threat of Medical Device Hacking & How Healthcare Organizations Can Prevent It
All attacks on the healthcare industry are vital to address. We believe the most pressing area to mitigate is the hacking of medical devices.
Week of 21 March 2022
A support engineer two contracts away: Okta, Lapsus$ and the hospital front door
In March 2022, Okta revealed that a support engineer at one of its subcontractors had been compromised. For hospitals that run every clinical login through one identity provider, the real exposure was two months of silence, and the logs they never kept.
Week of 17 May 2021
Ireland’s HSE attack was decided in the eight weeks before encryption
Ireland’s health service is remembered for the morning its hospitals went to paper. The independent review told a less dramatic, more useful story: the outcome was settled during nearly eight unnoticed weeks, across three stages of entry, dwell and response.
Week of 4 January 2021
Credit for security practice, payable only in arrears
Signed on January 5, 2021, a short HITECH amendment told regulators to go easier on breached organizations with recognized security practices. The catch: it takes a year of practice already running, so the credit is earned only before an incident, with everyday evidence.
Week of 7 September 2020
When a hospital diverts, the whole region absorbs the attack
A ransomware attack in Düsseldorf is remembered for a disputed death. Its lasting message for health systems is regional: when one hospital closes its doors to ambulances, the risk moves onto crews and neighboring hospitals that rarely plan for it, or measure it.
Week of 4 May 2020
Password spraying against research labs: an old attack on a new target
In May 2020, US and UK cyber agencies warned that state-backed hackers were guessing common passwords across health and research organizations to reach COVID-19 work. The defenses were familiar; applying them across academic medicine’s tangle of accounts, data and remote access was harder.