5 Things to Know About DDoS Attacks in Healthcare
HealthTech Magazine
Russell Smith
Distributed denial of service attacks are commonly used to target financial institutions, government infrastructure and cloud service providers. In 2020, however, DDoS attacks took on greater significance for healthcare providers as more hospitals than ever were targeted.
Cybercriminals use denial of service attacks to overwhelm networks and applications and take them offline. Distributed denial of service attacks go a step further by enlisting the help of botnets, which consist of many servers.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, cybercriminals increasingly preyed on the healthcare sector as organizations shifted to remote work and used online services for virus testing and vaccinations, according to a Netscout report on last year’s threat landscape. Online infrastructure company Cloudflare reported that malicious access requests and junk data sent to healthcare systems doubled in 2020.
Cybercriminals launch DDoS attacks for...