Background COVID-19 has challenged the resilience of the health care information system, which has affected our ability to achieve the global goal of health and well-being. The pandemic has resulted in a number of recent cyberattacks on hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, the US Department of Health and Human Services, the World Health Organization and its partners, and others. Objective The aim of this review was to identify key cybersecurity challenges, solutions adapted by the health sector, and areas of improvement needed to counteract the recent increases in cyberattacks (eg, phishing campaigns and ransomware attacks), which have been used by attackers to exploit vulnerabilities in technology and people introduced through changes to working practices in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods A scoping review was conducted by searching two major scientific databases (PubMed and Scopus) using the search formula “(covid OR healthcare) AND cybersecurity.” Reports, news articles, and industry white papers were also included if they were related directly to previously published works, or if they were the only available sources at the time of writing. Only articles in English published in the last decade were included (ie, 2011-2020) in order to focus on current issues, challenges, and solutions. Results We identified 9 main challenges in cybersecurity, 11 key solutions that health care organizations adapted to address these challenges, and 4 key areas that need to be strengthened in terms of cybersecurity capacity in the health sector. We also found that the most prominent and significant methods of cyberattacks that occurred during the pandemic were related to phishing, ransomware, distributed denial-of-service attacks, and malware. Conclusions  This scoping review identified the most impactful methods of cyberattacks that targeted the health sector during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the challenges in cybersecurity, solutions, and areas in need of improvement. We provided useful insights to the health sector on cybersecurity issues during the COVID-19 pandemic as well as other epidemics or pandemics that may materialize in the future.

As organisations are vulnerable to cyberattacks, their protection becomes a significant issue. Capability Maturity Models can enable organisations to benchmark current maturity levels against best practices. Although many maturity models have been already proposed in the literature, a need for models that integrate several regulations exists. This article presents a light, web-based model that can be used as a cybersecurity assessment tool for Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) of the United Kingdom. The novel Holistic Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment Framework incorporates all security regulations, privacy regulations, and best practices that HEIs must be compliant to, and can be used as a self assessment or a cybersecurity audit tool.

The healthcare information system (HIS) has become a victim of cyberattacks. Traditional ways to handle cyber incidents in healthcare organizations follow a predefined incident response (IR) procedure. However, this procedure is usually reactive, missing the opportunities to foresee danger on the horizon. Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) contains information on emerging attacks and should be ideally utilized to inform the IR procedure. However, current research shows that the IR has not been effectively informed by CTI, especially in healthcare organizations. This paper fills in this gap by proposing a proactive IR response procedure based on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) IR methodology. This paper then presents the NHS WannaCry case study to demonstrate the use of the proposed IR methodology. We collate cyber security advisories from different CTI sources such as US/UK CERT to protect interconnected systems and devices from Ransomware attacks. This research provides novel insights into the IR in healthcare through embedding CTI advisories into IR processes and concludes that our proposed IR procedure can be used to counteract WannaCry Ransomware using CTI advisories. It has the significance of transforming the way of IR from reactive to proactive using the CTI in healthcare.

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