Cybercriminals have been hacking into hospital computer systems for 2 decades or more to steal medical records and other personal information to sell on the dark web. This is a breach of patient privacy and a headache for hospitals, especially as they've had to comply with increasingly stringent federal regulations designed to stop it.Still, that kind of information theft doesn't really affect patient care, says Stoddard Manikin, a chief information security officer at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. That's why many health care providers didn't prioritize cybersecurity as much as they might have.

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"It's not always easy to explain to hospital executives why you need to spend millions of dollars to prevent something that you're not sure will happen," he says.But in the last few years, as cybersecurity experts got better at securing patient information, hackers came up with a much simpler plan: Ransomware."It's a much easier payday," Manikin says."Say you wanted to break into my house to get at my expensive comic book collection. You have to figure out how to get into my house, get from room to room, figure out where it is in the room, and then figure out when you get to the room that comic books are actually valuable. And then you still have to find a buyer.""Or," says Manikin, "You could just board up my doors, put a guard outside with a gun, and say, 'You can't get back into your own house until you pay me.'"Since ransomware locks hospitals out of their computer systems instead of stealing from them, cybercrimes against hospitals have evolved from a patient-privacy problem into a much more serious patient-safety problem.