Ransomware attacks are one of the most important cybersecurity challenges facing healthcare institutions today. Hospitals face targeted assaults on sensitive patient data and vital systems that have far-reaching impacts: the damage to healthcare infrastructure can disrupt patient care and result in substantial financial liabilities.
This guide provides a detailed overview of the best practices, essential defenses, and proactive strategies that healthcare organizations can use to prevent ransomware attacks. These measures can effectively protect valuable healthcare assets and ensure the continuity of patient care.
Ransomware is a malicious type of software designed to encrypt an organization's data, rendering it inaccessible until a ransom is paid to obtain the decryption key. Much of what makes the healthcare industry unique also makes it a prime target for ransomware attacks:
Sensitive health information and patient data: Electronic health records (EHRs) contain a wealth of personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI), making them highly valuable targets for cybercriminals seeking to exploit this data for financial gain.
Critical systems and infrastructure: Healthcare organizations rely extensively on a number of specialized devices and IT services—including medical devices, billing systems, and scheduling software—that provide a potential attack surface for ransomware.
Immediate and severe consequences: Ransomware attacks on hospitals and healthcare facilities can have immediate and potentially life-threatening consequences if critical systems are rendered inoperable, disrupting patient care and putting patients' health at risk.
Extensive third-party ecosystems: The healthcare industry relies heavily on a complex network of third-party vendors, including medical device manufacturers, software providers, and billing services. Attackers who breach the infrastructure of one of these external entities can quickly move into the healthcare organization's network.
Resource constraints: Many healthcare institutions, particularly smaller clinics and rural hospitals, may lack the financial resources and expertise to implement and maintain robust cybersecurity measures. This leaves them more vulnerable to attacks and less equipped to detect and respond to breaches when they occur.
The healthcare sector's increasing reliance on technology for patient care delivery, combined with the sensitive nature of medical data, has made it an attractive target for cybercriminals. A recent study revealed that the healthcare industry experienced a staggering 32% increase in cyberattacks in 2024 compared to the previous year, highlighting the urgent need for robust cybersecurity measures.
To effectively fortify healthcare organizations against the threat of ransomware, you need to understand the common vulnerabilities that attackers exploit to gain unauthorized access to critical systems and sensitive data:
Phishing and email scams: One of the most common methods cybercriminals employ is to exploit human error through carefully crafted phishing emails and social engineering tactics. Attackers often masquerade as trusted entities to trick unsuspecting employees into clicking on malicious links or downloading infected attachments. Once the user interacts with these elements, the ransomware can infiltrate the network and spread rapidly.
Unpatched systems and outdated software: Healthcare organizations often rely on legacy systems and software that may not receive regular security updates, leaving them vulnerable to known exploits. Cybercriminals actively scan for these unpatched vulnerabilities, using them as entry points to deploy ransomware and gain control of IT infrastructure.
Weak user credentials: Inadequate password policies and weak user credentials provide another avenue for attackers to breach healthcare networks. Brute-force attacks and credential stuffing techniques can be employed to guess or steal login information, granting unauthorized access to critical systems.
To mitigate these risks, healthcare organizations must implement a multi-layered security approach. This includes deploying robust email filtering systems to identify and block phishing attempts, regularly updating software and systems to address known vulnerabilities, and enforcing strong password policies across the organization.
Securing your healthcare organization’s infrastructure from ransomware and other attacks takes much more than a quick fix: for many enterprises, a complete rethink of security practices and elevated investment in security services is required in order to mitigate against worst case scenarios. Let’s dive into some best practices that can make your systems more resistant and resilient in the face of attacks.
In the healthcare industry, regular data backups play a crucial role in safeguarding sensitive patient information and ensuring the continuity of medical services. A robust data backup strategy can protect against data loss and system downtime.
One highly effective strategy is the use of secure, air-gapped backups. An air-gapped backup is physically isolated from your organization’s network, which means it remains secure even if hackers breach your infrastructure.
The use of air-gapped backups can be part of a larger strategy of diversifying backup locations, which is essential for ensuring data resilience. By storing backups in multiple locations, healthcare providers can safeguard their data against site-specific risks, such as natural disasters or hardware failures. This approach typically involves a combination of on- and off-site storage solutions. Backup hospital cloud network solutions offer a scalable and cost-effective way to store data remotely while facilitating easy access and recovery when needed.
For the management of unstructured data such as medical images, videos, and large document files, remote hospital NAS (Network-Attached Storage) backups are a particularly valuable option. NAS systems provide flexible and efficient storage solutions that can handle large volumes of unstructured data. By implementing remote NAS backups, healthcare facilities can ensure that their unstructured data is adequately protected and easily recoverable in the event of data corruption or loss.
Adopting these data backup strategies will help protect sensitive data and enhance the overall resilience of healthcare IT systems, ensuring that medical facilities remain operational even under adverse conditions
Because the stakes are immeasurably high in the healthcare industry, it’s important to equip staff with the knowledge and skills needed to recognize, report and avoid falling prey to phishing attacks.
Creating a culture of vigilance among healthcare providers is the cornerstone of a strong cybersecurity posture. Employees must understand that they are the first line of defense against cyber threats. Regular training sessions help inculcate best practices for handling patient data, recognizing suspicious emails, and securely managing passwords. Making staff members active participants in data protection creates an environment where cybersecurity is a shared concern.
Cybercriminals are constantly refining their methods for bypassing security measures, so you should keep healthcare providers and staff abreast of the latest phishing schemes to reduce the risk of a successful attack. Transparent communication about recent threats and potential vulnerabilities can lead to proactive identification and reporting of phishing attempts before they cause harm.
Mock phishing exercises can be a particularly valuable training tool. These simulations can expose employees to real-world scenarios without the risk, allowing them to practice their response to phishing attempts in a controlled environment. Such exercises reinforce training and increase the likelihood that employees will recognize and respond appropriately to actual threats.
Keeping systems patched and up to date is particularly critical within the healthcare industry in order to close off known vulnerabilities that could be exploited by cybercriminals.
The wide array of technologies that hospitals and healthcare providers rely on–from EHR systems to diagnostic equipment and interconnected devices within the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)—enhance patient care and operational efficiency, but also introduce potential vulnerabilities. Cyber adversaries are continually scanning for and exploiting these weaknesses to gain unauthorized access to healthcare networks, steal sensitive data, or deploy ransomware.
That’s why you need a robust patch management strategy. This involves regularly updating software and operating systems with the latest patches released by vendors. Timely application of these patches is crucial—the window between the discovery of a vulnerability and its exploitation by attackers can be incredibly short.
Medical devices and network equipment require a specialized approach to patch management due to their critical role in patient care and the complexity of healthcare networks. Manufacturers of medical devices frequently issue updates to address security issues, and healthcare IT teams must ensure these updates are applied promptly and efficiently without disrupting clinical operations. This requires a careful balance between maintaining operational continuity and ensuring device security.
Effective patch management and system updates in the healthcare sector necessitate a comprehensive strategy that includes inventory management of all devices and software, prioritization based on vulnerability severity and potential impact on patient safety, and rigorous testing of patches to ensure compatibility. Such practices not only protect against data breaches and cyber attacks but also uphold the reliability and performance of critical healthcare systems, which will ultimately improve patient care and safety.
Healthcare organizations can significantly enhance their cybersecurity posture by compartmentalizing different types of network traffic and applying strict user permissions to important data.
Separating patient care systems from administrative networks ensures that critical systems responsible for direct patient care—such as EHR platforms, medical imaging devices, and patient monitoring systems—are isolated from general administrative networks used for tasks like billing, human resources, and day-to-day operations. This will reduce the risk of sensitive patient data being accessed through less secure administrative systems.
Enforcing strict network access privileges for users can similarly protect the most sensitive areas of your infrastructure. Not every user requires access to all systems or types of data on the network. Access control policies should be based on the principle of least privilege, where users are granted the minimum level of access necessary to perform their job functions. This reduces the chance of sensitive information being accessed by unauthorized or less trusted users and limits the potential damage from compromised user accounts.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) can serve to reinforce access control measures. MFA adds an additional layer of security by requiring users to provide two or more verification factors to gain access to systems, which significantly hinders unauthorized access: even if a user's primary credentials are compromised, attackers still would need to bypass the additional authentication barriers.
An Incident Response Plan (IRP) is a critical component of data protection in the healthcare industry, as it specifies proactive steps to take following a security breach. Organizations draft IRPs that lay out how they plan to handle potential threats and actual attacks. A well-defined incident response plan equips healthcare organizations to deal with catastrophic events such as ransomware attacks swiftly and effectively, ensuring that patient data is secured and services remain uninterrupted.
Having this documentation available plays an instrumental role in minimizing damage and restoring services efficiently, and the process of writing one can help organizations spot weak points in their cybersecurity infrastructure and processes.
A key element of an incident response plan is the clear delineation of roles and responsibilities for the incident response team. This clarity empowers team members to act decisively and confidently during a crisis, with each individual understanding their duties in the detection, analysis, containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident activities.
Procedures for the isolation of infected systems and the containment of malware are at the heart of incident response. These steps help to prevent an attack from moving laterally across the network, and will thus safeguard critical databases and infrastructure. The rapid initiation of recovery processes is also crucial to restoring operations and mitigating the impact of attacks on patient care: after isolation, technical teams should begin data recovery using backups that are regularly updated and securely stored. During this process, comprehensive system checks must be conducted to ensure the ransomware has been completely eradicated before systems are restored.
A healthcare organization’s IRP should define critical applications and list the order in which they should be recovered following an incident. Such prioritization ensures that services crucial for patient care, like EHRs, clinical management systems, and life-supporting machinery, are restored first. Secondary systems, such as billing and administrative tools, can be brought back online later. By predetermining these priorities, healthcare facilities can ensure a focused and efficient recovery process, which is essential during disruptive incidents.
Any incident response should be regularly tested and updated to maintain its relevance and efficacy. Simulated exercises and drills can expose weaknesses within the plan and point the way to necessary adjustments. These updates should reflect changes in the cyber threat landscape, advancements in technology, and shifts in organizational structure or operational practices.
External communication protocols embedded within the incident response plan are vital for the timely notification of all stakeholders, including patients, regulators, and law enforcement. Collaboration with law enforcement is particularly important during ransomware attacks. Accurate and timely communication will not only help manage legal and regulatory obligations; it will also aid in preserving trust and transparency—a particularly sensitive issue in the healthcare sector where patient confidentiality is paramount.
Zero Trust is an increasingly widespread security philosophy, and at its heart is the concept that no user or device should be inherently trusted, whether they operate within the internal network or come from outside. This skepticism dictates that any entity attempting to access resources should be continuously verified. Implementing Zero Trust at healthcare organizations enhances security and reduces the probability of unauthorized access to sensitive patient data.
Adhering to the principle of least privilege access is another cornerstone of Zero Trust. By ensuring users have only the necessary permissions to fulfill their job functions, the potential for data breaches and insider threats is greatly reduced. In healthcare, where personnel often change roles or move between departments, dynamically adjusting permissions is critical for maintaining a secure data environment.
Micro-segmentation takes network compartmentalization further by creating even more granular secure zones within the healthcare network. This strategy makes it difficult for attackers to move laterally across the network if they compromise a particular segment, protecting critical systems like patient records and research data from widespread breaches. For example, access to patient information systems can be isolated from the rest of the network infrastructure, thereby minimizing the potential damage from an attack.
Finally, constant monitoring and logging of all network traffic empowers healthcare organizations with real-time threat detection and rapid response capabilities. By analyzing traffic, security systems and staff can identify and respond to anomalies that may indicate a cyber attack, such as unauthorized data transfers or unusual login attempts. Traffic logs also provide invaluable forensic data for post-incident analysis, helping to prevent future breaches.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions provide healthcare organizations with sophisticated tools to detect, investigate, and respond to cybersecurity threats on workstations, servers, and mobile devices. That’s an essential capability, given the widespread adoption of telehealth technologies and mobile health applications.
One of the foundational features of EDR solutions is the continuous monitoring and collection of endpoint data. This enables real-time visibility and analysis, allowing healthcare IT teams to identify unusual activities that could indicate a security breach. Healthcare providers must be able to promptly recognize such potential threats in order to maintain the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive patient information.
EDR solutions also implement advanced behavioral analysis technologies. By comparing endpoint activities against known patterns of malicious behavior, EDR systems can detect deviations that signal a potential threat, such as ransomware or a malware attack. Such early detection is critical in the healthcare setting, where even a brief interruption to systems can have significant implications for patient care and safety.
Automated response and containment actions are another critical component of EDR solutions. When a threat is detected, EDR systems can automatically execute protocols to isolate affected endpoints, preventing the spread of malware or ransomware within the healthcare network. This automation enables rapid containment, reducing the scope and scale of an attack and thereby protecting patient data from unauthorized access or encryption by ransomware.
Finally, EDR provides healthcare organizations with forensic investigation tools, facilitating an in-depth analysis of security incidents. This not only aids in the rapid remediation of immediate threats but also helps organizations understand attack vectors and vulnerabilities so they can strengthen their defenses against future breaches.
Even if your organization has implemented robust cybersecurity measures, you cannot consider yourself completely immune to cyber attacks, and how you react to one is as important as the work you do to prevent it. The following strategies can help mitigate the impact of a successful ransomware attack:
Immutable snapshots and rapid restore: Implement solutions that create immutable snapshots of critical data, enabling swift recovery without the need to pay the ransom. Rubrik's healthcare cybersecurity solutions provide rapid restore capabilities to minimize downtime and ensure business continuity.
Disaster recovery resting: Regularly conduct simulated ransomware attacks and recovery exercises to ensure that staff are well-prepared and systems can be restored promptly in the event of an actual incident.
Communications management: Establish a comprehensive communication plan to keep staff, patients, and stakeholders informed throughout any incidents. Maintaining transparency can help foster trust and manage expectations during the recovery process.
Forensic analysis: Following the containment of the attack, conduct a thorough forensic analysis to identify the attack vector and gather insights to strengthen defenses against future threats.
As ransomware attacks targeting healthcare institutions continue to grow in sophistication and frequency, the need for robust cybersecurity defenses has become increasingly critical. Safeguarding patient data and ensuring the uninterrupted delivery of care necessitates a holistic approach that encompasses technology, processes, and people.
Healthcare organizations are prime targets for ransomware attacks due to the critical nature of their services and the sensitive patient data they hold. Research by Sophos found that two-thirds of surveyed healthcare organizations had been hit by ransomware in 2024—a four-year high. The urgency to restore essential patient care services often pressures hospitals to pay the ransom, making them attractive targets for cybercriminals.
To effectively combat the growing threat of ransomware, healthcare administrators must prioritize the development and implementation of robust cybersecurity frameworks. This includes maintaining comprehensive data backups, deploying advanced endpoint protection solutions, conducting regular cybersecurity training for staff, segmenting networks to limit the spread of infections, and ensuring all systems and devices are promptly patched and updated.
Partnering with trusted cybersecurity providers like Rubrik can provide healthcare organizations with the expertise and tools necessary to stay ahead of emerging threats. Rubrik offers customized solutions designed to safeguard hospitals from cyber attacks and ensure the highest level of data protection for patients and staff.
By taking proactive steps to strengthen their cybersecurity posture, healthcare organizations can significantly reduce the risk of falling victim to ransomware attacks and ensure the continuity of vital patient care services. Don't wait until it's too late—contact Rubrik Sales today to learn more about customized solutions to safeguard your healthcare organization from the growing threat of ransomware