In relation to the news that a Philadelphia company that sells software used in hundreds of clinical trials, including the crash effort to develop tests, treatments and a vaccine for the coronavirus, was hit by a ransomware attack that has slowed some of those trials over the past two weeks, please find commentary on this below.

This is yet another lesson on how far-reaching ransomware can disrupt sectors of business. All valuable data needs to have measures in place to keep it safe. Cyber resilience requires layers of protection from education at the individual user level, to endpoint security, network security and data protection and back up. Until the healthcare sector can improve the way they handle data, they will continue to be a vulnerable, thus appealing, target to cybercriminal acts like ransomware.