CyberPeace Institute: 'Cyberattacks on healthcare is a story about people'

Cyberattacks are increasing and evolving with time, exploiting vulnerabilities in the sector's fragile digital infrastructure and weaknesses in its cybersecurity regime. The result is a threat to global health and to people, says the new report published by the CyberPeace Institute yesterday.

“Playing with Lives: Cyberattacks on Healthcare are Attacks on People” focuses on the impacts of attacks on a human perspective and calls on governments to remove rewards for criminals and hostile states attacking healthcare.

Stéphane Duguin, CEO of the CyberPeace Institute explains:

“We went from a very technical approach of the threat to something more human. In the end, it’s a report about health, about the fact that health is at stake.”

The increasing number of attacks can also be explained by the very low-risk and high-reward aspect of the crime.

“The attackers are criminal groups, state sponsored actors or state actors. And everywhere, impunity is really high. For criminal groups, you see that the enforcement of domestic or international law, in order to go against their activities is quite low. And when it comes to state sponsored actors or state actors, the distribution is on the margin. Plus, the information that is publicly available about the distribution is far from being sufficient.”

In this podcast interview, Duguin guides us through the report’s findings and recommendations.