Cybersecurity provider Emisoft recently released statistics indicating that 2022 saw no decrease in successful ransomware attacks among U.S. local government and healthcare providers despite new legislation at both the federal and state levels aimed at curbing it. According to the numbers provided in the report, 106 local governments, 44 universities and colleges, 45 school districts and 25 healthcare providers were affected by ransomware attacks last year.
The report goes on to detail some of the impacts of these attacks: The local government of Quincy, MA paid a $500,000 ransom in 2022. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest in the U.S., refused to pay a ransom and had stolen data released on the Internet. In seventeen separate instances, ransomware attacks on hospitals resulted in protected health information being stolen. In one of these, a 3-year-old patient received an overdose of pain medicine because the system for calculating the dosage was compromised. ...read more!
