It’s the end of May, 2024, and across America, doctors and nurses are using handwritten notes to chart patient issues. They’re sending faxes, and delivering orders by hand for tests and prescriptions.
In 19 states, facilities associated with Ascension, one of the largest private healthcare systems in the US, have patients stuck in emergency rooms, waiting for lab results and reading machine results without the assistance of electronic uploads. They’ve diverted ambulances, as thousands of medical professionals revert to old methods because of a ransomware attack.
It’s an attack eerily reminiscent of the Change Healthcare event that paralyzed a healthcare billing system that handles a third of all American patient records, and is detailed here.
It’s also an experience becoming all too-common in American healthcare, and we’ll look at the group behind this, and other cybersecurity highlights from the last two months, in our bi-monthly, Q2 cybersecurity roundup 2024.
[Check out our prior cybersecurity roundup, for Q1 cybersecurity trends.]
With so much going on, it’s our goal to help keep you informed, so you can be as proactive as possible with your data security, and overall cyber defense!
Headline Events for April and May
We start with the biggest cybersecurity news, across the varying forms of cyberattack: