Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Cyber Security Issues in the Healthcare Domain

Abstract

The world is facing the biggest pandemic in 100 years: COVID-19. This has led us to live in new ways like social distancing, which caused India to endorse the use of the internet and technology. This shift to greater online use has created a digital dependency that favors attackers in terms of exploiting a vulnerability in every sector. Cyber-attacks are one of the global risks in today’s digital era. Sectors like banking and retail have become victims of and been badly affected by different types of attacks. With the recent trends, healthcare has become a popular new target during the pandemic. Due to the complex IT infrastructure of healthcare organizations, the threat of cyber-attack and the resulting disruption to medical services could impact a patient’s care or may even be a threat to the patient’s life. During COVID-19, when people around the world were working from home using video conferencing software such as Zoom, Skype, and Google Meet, many accounts were compromised and sold on the dark web. While medical professionals were busy developing a vaccine for COVID-19, attackers targeted the research institutes and many healthcare organizations and demanded ransom. Due to digital innovations in the healthcare industry, it has become a new target for the theft of clinical information. The cyber-attacks have targeted healthcare organizations, particularly healthcare bodies, pharmaceutical companies, and research organizations. The healthcare sector is behind other sectors in securing medical data; hence, it is incumbent on us to focus on ensuring confidentiality and protecting patient information from unauthorized access. In the past few years, healthcare information security has gained attention from all sectors of research and business. The primary reason is the innovations in information management, big data, information security, and cyber security in the area of healthcare. This has driven healthcare organizations to face new challenges. The insights in this chapter can be helpful for managers and decision-makers to manage the organizational information security practices that enterprises faced during COVID-19.