And a study by the American Hospital Association, "Ransomware Attacks on Hospitals have Changed," reported that such attacks are now even causing threats to the lives of patients.

"Hospital leaders can take a more direct role in strengthening the sector's cyber defenses by participating in and promoting public-private partnerships and other collaborative efforts," the report advised.

According to the Tribune, the AHA also depicted the growing size of the threat. "More than 600 U.S. health care organizations and more than 18 million patient records were affected in 2020 alone at an estimated cost of nearly $21 billion," according to the publication.

Cybercrime in the future is likely to bet more sophisticated and difficult to stop. In a study reported by HCB News December 23rd, AI models and human radiologists were easily fooled by hacks that manipulated images.

University of Pittsburgh researchers, reporting in Nature Communications, simulated an attack that falsified mammogram images, which succeeded in fooling AI models almost 70% of the time and human radiologists from 29% and 71%, depending on the individual.

“What we want to show with this study is that this type of attack is possible, and it could lead AI models to make the wrong diagnosis — which is a big patient safety issue. By understanding how AI models behave under adversarial attacks in medical contexts, we can start thinking about ways to make these models safer and more robust,” said senior author Shandong Wu, associate professor of radiology, biomedical informatics and bioengineering at Pitt, in a statement.

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