Security News

The FritzFrog botnet that's been active for more than two years has resurfaced with an alarming infection rate, growing ten times in just a month of hitting healthcare, education, and government systems with an exposed SSH server. Researchers at internet security company Akamai spotted a new version of the FritzFrog malware, which comes with interesting new functions, like using the Tor proxy chain.

A peer-to-peer Golang botnet has resurfaced after more than a year to compromise servers belonging to entities in the healthcare, education, and government sectors within a span of a month, infecting a total of 1,500 hosts. Dubbed FritzFrog, "The decentralized botnet targets any device that exposes an SSH server - cloud instances, data center servers, routers, etc. - and is capable of running any malicious payload on infected nodes," Akamai researchers said in a report shared with The Hacker News.

Kaspersky: Many wearables and healthcare devices are open to attack due to vulnerable data transfer protocol. Kaspersky security researchers announced this week that a popular data transfer protocol used by healthcare devices is full of critical vulnerabilities.

Ransomware was the most common attack method behind third-party breaches in 2021, initiating more than one out of four incidents analyzed. Despite immense cybersecurity improvements following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the healthcare industry was the most common victim of attacks caused by third parties, accounting for 33% of incidents last year.

43% of the growth will originate from North America for the healthcare fraud detection market. Market growth in North America will be faster than the growth of the market in other regions.

This week's announcement by Florida's Broward Health System that the most intimate medical data of 1,357,879 of its patients was breached in the fall should serve as a warning that the healthcare software supply chain will be a juicy target for cybercriminals as we head into 2022, researchers warn. As startling as the number of impacted Broward patients may seem, Ron Bradley, vice president of Shared Assessments calls this breach, "Just a drop in the proverbial bucket related to healthcare losses in 2021.".

The global healthcare cloud infrastructure market size is expected to reach $142 billion by 2028, according to ResearchAndMarkets. The growing trend of healthcare digitalization, rising expenditures, overburdened health systems, rising traffic on the network, growing data siloes, and the emergence of remote working is contributing to the demand for healthcare cloud infrastructure systems and solutions.

A tally of public data breach reports so far shows that tens of millions of healthcare records have been exposed to unauthorized parties. Most of the largest data breaches result from ransomware attacks and the first ten of them account for more than half of all the healthcare records exposed in 2021.

The survey reinforces the need for healthcare organizations to integrate digital technology and solutions into all areas of the business ecosystem, including secure payment technology to provide peace of mind and ensure patients enjoy secure and seamless payment experiences. Between large hospital networks, private practices, specialists, and urgent care, the survey found that 44% of respondents felt that private practices handled payment and personally identifiable information most securely, and large hospital networks were rated by even fewer at 33%. With a 25% increase in healthcare data breaches year over year and reports of hospitals accounting for 30% of all large data breaches, patients have a heightened sense of awareness and interest in the processes their providers take to protect their information.

The healthcare cybersecurity market size is anticipated to record a valuation of $35.5 billion by 2027, according to the most recent study by Global Market Insights. The DDoS segment in the healthcare cybersecurity market.