Cyberattacks have surged in recent years, with the health care system and other critical sectors increasingly coming under digital assaults as the threat of malware like ransomware and foreign spyware continues to evolve.
Last year in particular saw officials and lawmakers renew their focus on cybersecurity and seek to secure the country's critical sectors from rising cyber threats. The issue is expected to take center stage again in the coming year, as many of those threats are still escalating while the cyber sector is confronting an ongoing workforce shortage in its efforts to bolster the U.S.'s digital defenses.
Here are four cyber concerns expected to take priority in 2023:
Threats to critical sectors: The financial, energy and health care sectors are all facing a skyrocketing number of hacks. Cyberattacks have robbed companies in those industries of hundreds of millions of dollars, exposed data and even disrupted essential services, as when a ransomware attack forced the Colonial Pipeline to shut down in 2021, causing gas shortages in several states.
- The health care sector in particular has seen a rise in cyberattacks in the last few years, particularly ransomware attacks targeting hospitals in order to gain access to sensitive information like patient data or medical research and technology.
- Increasing threats to the sector have set off alarm bells in Washington, with Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, warning this fall that cyberattacks could lead to delays in treatment and even patients' deaths.
Ransomware attacks: Recent years have seen an especially dramatic spike in ransomware attacks, particularly targeting the health care and financial sectors.
Last year alone, ransomware groups caused outages in multiple hospital systems, temporarily closed schools in parts of the U.S., carried out multimillion-dollar hacks on a number of companies and drove Costa Rica to declare a state of emergency in May as a barrage of attacks impacted its government services.
Foreign spyware: Foreign spyware garnered attention last year following controversy surrounding the embattled Israeli spyware firm NSO Group, which was blacklisted by the Department of Commerce in 2021 for allegedly facilitating unlawful surveillance used against government officials, journalists, dissidents and human rights activists.
Congress has since taken steps to address the allegations. In July, the House Intelligence Committee included a provision in the Intelligence Authorization Act authorizing the director of national intelligence to prohibit the U.S. intelligence community from buying and using foreign spyware.
Labor shortage: Rising cyber threats have brought new urgency to a long-time labor shortage in the industry as both federal agencies and private companies have scrambled to fill key cyber roles.
The industry has sought to address the shortage by investing in workforce development, and is expected to continue doing so moving forward.
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