The UC San Diego School of Medicine recently received a $9.5 million grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). As stated in the UC San Diego Health press release, the funding will be used to enhance the cybersecurity of the U.S. health care system. The research will be dedicated to identifying methods to prevent ransomware attacks and early signs of cyber threats. The establishment of the Center for Healthcare Cybersecurity at UC San Diego will further contribute to the development of pioneering strategies in this critical area.

IBM's 2023 Cost of a Data Breach report indicates that to recover from ransomware attacks, the average healthcare system this year has spent an astounding $11 million. Therefore, the researchers are planning to actually simulate ransomware attacks in order to understand them better. Furthermore, they intend to design an emergency health care technology platform to ensure that, even in the midst of cybersecurity disruption, hospitals can maintain their essential services.

According to Dr. Christian Dameff, co-principal investigator of the project and medical director of cybersecurity at UC San Diego Health, rural hospitals and critical access health care providers are especially vulnerable. Setting their sights primarily not on densely populated urban areas, but on rural ones, these cyberattacks can cause smaller health care systems to completely collapse. This, in turn, deprives patients in these locations of urgently needed medical care. The project’s co-principal investigator and assistant clinical professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine, Dr. Jeffrey Tully, shares these concerns, as he sees as an escalating issue the catastrophic recovery costs when these facilities are under attack.

The project will be assisted by Stefan Savage, cybersecurity expert and MacArthur fellow. Holding the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Chair in Information and Computer Science at UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, he will contribute his unique know-how to the integration of cybersecurity strategies into the healthcare setting.

Despite the widespread acknowledgment of cybersecurity dangers, many health care entities are still significantly unprepared for an attack's fallout. Dr. Christopher Longhurst, chief digital officer at UC San Diego Health, believes the newly created Center for Healthcare Cybersecurity can help address this concern. Its mission is to ensure a state of readiness in the face of cyber threats among health care providers, starting with the current project.