Wow. What a crazy whirlwind of a last 18-months. COVID-19, a 2020 none of us could have imagined. (Although I’ve been introduced to some creative fiction that came really close.)
We are LONG past 2020 now, but this post was sitting in drafts and I thought I would subject you to it anyway.
Unprecedented ransomware attacks including a blitz against healthcare organizations that escalated quickly. I was hosting a series of healthcare focused roundtables at the time, and on several of the sessions we went from an average of 10-20 attendees to over 100. Nedless to say, people were paying attention. And for the first time, many media outlets reported that a ransomware attack led directly to the death of a patient. The story was that ransomware intended for a nearby university crippled a German hospital. As a result, a patient headed for Duesseldorf University Clinic was redirected to a hospital in Wuppertal, a 32-kilometer (20-mile) drive. This delayed Doctors giving her treatment for an hour, and she died… Since then, the argument has been presented that she had complications that meant she likely would have died anyway, but this STILL brought a ton of attention to the issues of ransomware and how it could impact patient safety. This attention has resulted in board members and executives paying attention to not just compliance, but good security hygiene. This is good news and should be celebrated.
The FBI’s Internet Crime Report for 2020 was released in March 2021, and had some startling statistics. They received over 790,000 (791.790 if you’re actually counting) complaints of internet crime (more than $300,000 more than in 2019), and reported losses of more than $4.2bn. They received an average of over 2,000 complaints per day, and 5.6 million total complaints since inception. It’s an interesting read.
So 2021 was when we were all supposed to go back to “normal” whatever that is.
From a contested election, to riots and racial violence these truly are troubled times. So what’s in store in the rest of 2021? I, for one, hope we pay attention to our better angels and feed the beast that embraces positivity and forward progress. Let’s see what happens!
Now that we are in