Cybersecurity challenges for field hospitals: impacts of emergency cyberthreats during emergency situations

The use of technology and IT assets in healthcare and emergency response personnel in field hospitals improves emergency care and service delivery. However, these benefits create increasing concerns about the security of infrastructure such as medical devices, health data etc. Healthcare being an attractive target due to its rich source of valuable data and its weak defences, this paper evaluates how cyberthreat actors take advantage of a current emergency situation to exploit and attack the healthcare emergency response IT infrastructure. It also explores the opportunistic approach used by cyberthreat actors, and highlights the new vulnerabilities' creative themes used to effectively deliver social engineering campaigns and physical attack scenarios successfully. Furthermore, it establishes the impacts of the cyber-attacks on the emergency response infrastructure and its stakeholders.