Healthcare in the United States continues to be more and more digitalized as technology gets more and more advanced. Healthcare systems have found convenience in digitalizing patient records and it was even more convenient during times when the Coronavirus was at its peak. The sudden increase of many hospitals and doctors depending on digital services meant the increase in programs coded to target these services and steal patient health records.
The first instance of bot or malware attacks came from registering to get the vaccine shot. Users may have noticed the CAPTCHAs they needed to pass in order to set up an appointment for the COVID vaccine. These attacks made a target, not on the vaccine centers, but the general public, most scammers will attack the sites creating thousands of fake accounts and register for the vaccine all at once, once registered they hold all the vaccine slots in their hands. This is merely just an inconvenience for users planning to make an appointment, rather millions of people get scammed by these scammers into buying the vaccine slots, unknowingly. CAPTCHAs protected these vaccine portals by preventing these bot attacks.
More recently, websites have begun to reimplement CAPTCHA as a means of prevention, although professionals have begun to grow concerned over the fact that bots may be able to easily surpass any CAPTCHA or firewall implemented against the attacks. These attacks pose no only a threat to patient information but they pose a threat to many lives too. If bots manage to get past secure healthcare systems, they can potentially attack machinery that is under the same system, like for example, surgical robots. These put the patient's health at risk and have shown hospitals the action that needs to immediately be taken against all potential attacks. Developers will now have to scramble to find an alternative to CAPTCHA that does not require bot assistance and verification.
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