It’s good that AI is rapidly being enlisted in the battle against the coronavirus, but what’s not so good is the increased attention hackers may be paying to AI-driven systems as a result of their increased presence.

According a recent article at The Hill, hospitals have long been a tempting target for hackers, “particularly for ransomware attacks, in which a system is locked out and hackers ask for money to unlock it.”  And as the coronavirus crisis intensifies, experts warn these systems and the patients they support are increasingly at risk.

As John Riggi, senior adviser for cybersecurity and risk at the American Hospital Association (AHA), summed up the threat, “Obviously any disruption or denial of service of any type of medical health technology which interrupts patient care is definitely a significant issue. Worst-case scenario, life-saving medical devices may be rendered inoperable.”

With the rapid spread of the coronavirus, healthcare professionals are quickly turning to AI to help speed diagnoses, such as reading X-rays determining risks to patients, but according to John Frownfelter, the chief medical information officer for health care-focused AI group Jvion, even before the pandemic hospitals weren’t really keeping up in the battle against hackers.

“Cybersecurity is getting more and more sophisticated where for hospitals, it’s not their core business, but the bar is getting higher for them to match the efforts to breach them essentially,” Frownfelter said. “I think this trend is going to continue until some paradigm shift occurs.”

The coronavirus pandemic is providing new opportunities for companies to deploy AI resources, Frownwelter noted, but he cautioned that if hackers were to target AI systems amid the coronavirus crisis, it could lead to delayed care for patients at a time when every moment counts.

“There are [some] radiologists that are much faster and more efficient at reading imaging stories,” Frownfelter said. “Radiologists can glance at it and confirm that and take a fraction of the time ... if you took that away, you would have delays in getting images read and interpreted and getting back to physicians.”

Even beyond the battle with COVID-19, experts say the increased use of AI can be a double-edged sword.

For example, Ray Page, a Texas-based oncologist and fellow at the American Society of Clinical Oncology, told The Hill that he uses AI to track his patients throughout their cancer treatment, but he confessed to being “apprehensive” about the implications of AI systems being compromised by hackers.

“If this gets hacked, or we lose access to those tools, then basically we are going back to the way of using clinical judgment,” Page said.   

Policymakers, too, have picked up on the increased threat as AI use ramps up.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told The Hill earlier this month that his concerns around the cybersecurity of hospitals were only heightened by the coronavirus pandemic.

“While we’ve seen the sector make some strides in recent months, we’re still operating from a unnecessarily low security baseline compared to other critical infrastructure sectors, and I fear any weaknesses could be magnified during a crisis such as this,” Warner said.

Indeed, noted the AHA’s Riggi, “The bad guys are using the COVID-19 pandemic to exploit and conduct further frauds ... a despicable and heinous crime.”