Hackers today are not only limited to causing financial loss but also a major setback to life.
Sophisticated medical devices and life-supporting systems are all connected through invisible networks, which is exploited could be fatal. These are nightmare situations and worse is that many organisations haven't a clue how many unsecured devices are connected to their networks, cyber-security experts warn.
It was an ordinary day at a busy hospital - doctors, nurses and surgeons rushed about attending to the health of their patients.
For Hussein Syed, chief information security officer for the largest health provider in New Jersey, it was the health of his IT network that was keeping him busy.
RWJ Barnabas Health's 13 hospitals include 30,000 computers, 300 apps, a data centre, as well as all the mobile phones hooking up to the hospitals' wi-fi networks.
But when he called in a specialist cyber-security firm to carry out a full audit, he discovered that there were in fact 70,000 internet-enabled devices accessing the health firm's network - far more than he'd expected.
"We found a lot of things we were not aware of," Mr Syed tells the BBC, "systems that weren't registered with IT and which didn't meet our security standards."
These included security cameras and seemingly innocuous gadgets such as uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) - units that provide backup battery power in the event of a power cut.
Hack into a UPS and you could potentially switch off life-critical machines, he explains. Or hackers could steal patient data, encrypt it, then demand a ransom for its safe return.
On the black market "health data is worth 50 times more than credit card data", says Mr Syed.
With the proliferation of IoT [internet of things] devices, the attack surface for hackers has increased massively. The difficulty is that IoT devices are generally simple, cheap and low-powered, without the capability of running the antivirus programs operated by traditional computers.
This necessitates a different approach to security, a growing number of experts believe.
