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Healthcare institutions have more confidence than ever in their own cybersecurity. This is shown by Infoblox’s new survey of 605 healthcare IT professionals in the Benelux, the United Kingdom and Germany.

The WannaCry ransomware attack in 2017 was a good response to the shock, according to the investigation. This attack shut down companies all over the world, including fifteen hospitals in the Netherlands. After that attack, healthcare institutions increased their investments in cyber security and IT.

In most cases, this involved an increase of between 11 and 20 percent in investments (43 percent). Only one percent says that there has been no extra investment in their own organisation.

Now, 92 percent of IT professionals surveyed are confident that their organization is prepared for a cyber attack and can respond well to it. That’s a big difference from the 82% who said that two years ago. In the Benelux, confidence is even higher, at 98 percent.

Investments

The most important investments are in application security, with 81 percent, followed by network monitoring (67 percent) and antivirus software (63 percent). The growing number of IoT devices in the company network is also well anticipated. 95 percent of the institutions in the Benelux have an effective safety policy for these devices. According to 4%, there is a policy, but it is not used effectively.

The majority of connected devices run on Windows 10, Mac OS X and Linux. However, 5 percent of organizations still have equipment running on Windows 8 or older. 98 percent of respondents in the Benelux say that devices can be patched and updated regularly. 43 percent do this once every two to three weeks. 7 percent say they even do this several times a week.

Paying ransom

In addition, 41% of healthcare institutions in the Benelux have drawn up a ransom payment plan in the event of such an attack. 83 percent of the healthcare institutions in this region are also prepared to pay ransom money in the event of a ransomware attack. 13 percent say they absolutely don’t.

68 percent of the organisations in the Benelux say they continue to use automated systems that scan networks for suspicious activities. A quarter also has its own Security Operations Centre (SOC) to carry out such scans.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.