China increases cyber attacks on hospitals to ‘humiliate' Taiwan
It was the work of a 20-year-old Chinese hacker named Lo Chengyu, known as 'Crazyhunter', who had stolen 16.6 million patient records, according to police.
Lo demanded a ransom of $100,000, but when the hospital refused, he set up a website where he released the victims' names and threatened to post their records as well.
However, security experts managed to expel the virus with no money exchanged.
Since February, Taiwan has experienced an increase in the number of cyber attacks against hospitals, along with local government and tax offices, with the majority coming from China.
China claims Taiwan as part of its territory, which the government in Taipei firmly rejects, and has threatened to invade the island on multiple occasions.
While Beijing has yet to use full-blown force, it has employed a wide range of 'grey-zone' measures, which fall short of open warfare but seek to coerce Taiwan and grind the country down ahead of a possible attack.
Over the last three years, Taiwan has made significant strides in developing mechanisms to protect itself against Chinese grey-zone attacks, but many vulnerabilities remain, especially in cyber space.
'They have no capability to attack our defence department website or foreign affairs website or the Ministry of Digital Affairs website,' said Herming Chiueh, the country's deputy minister of digital affairs.
'So they need to shift their attack to our weak part, which are hospitals,' he said during an interview in June.
Mr Chiueh's rise to the job reflects the rapid growth of Taiwan's cyber security team and its expanding capabilities.
He assumed the role in 2022 – the same year the ministry was founded – taking leave from his work as an engineering professor at a university in Hsinchu, Taiwan's main technology hub.
In three short years, Taiwan's cyber security mandate has grown from a 20-person team within the executive branch to nearly 500 people spread out across the entire government as the country faces a rapidly intensifying crisis.
Last year, the island experienced an average of 2.4 million cyber attacks daily – double the daily average in 2023 – with 80 per cent targeting government agencies.
While data for the first half of 2025 is not yet available, Mr Chiueh said the amount has only continued to increase.
This is partly because Taiwan now has more sensors that are able to detect attacks and partly because China has thrown so many resources into expanding its cyber technology and ability to launch cyber attacks.
Attacks on hospitals
Hospital networks store some of the most personal information on a person – from family history to detailed accounts of any sicknesses, making them prime targets for an adversary.
The attacks against hospitals, which have been primarily centred on obtaining personal data, seem to be an attempt by China to show off its cyber strengths.
They are likely part of a multi-pronged effort by China to intimidate Taiwan by highlighting its vulnerabilities, as well as to lay the groundwork for a potential future invasion.
'The only purpose is to try to humiliate and show that they have the capability to disturb us as a society,' said Mr Chiueh.
He explained that the hackers will often post the data that they harvest on the dark web as a trophy, similar to what Lo threatened to do with the data from MacKay Memorial Hospital.
Lennon Chang, a cyber security expert and associate professor at Deakin University in Australia, said that by posting sensitive information online, Chinese hackers could instil doubt over the government's ability to protect its citizens.
'It could create negative impressions or images of leaders in Taiwan,' he said.
Hospitals are also an integral part of a country's resilience during wartime. An adversary's ability to interrupt or incapacitate a target's healthcare network during an assault could provide them with a significant advantage.
'They could be trying to reveal the vulnerabilities of these hospitals so that during critical times they will be able to hack into and shut down the system or create a mess within the hospitals,' said Mr Chang.
Seven 'cyber armies'
Taiwan has traced the majority of its cyber attacks back to China and the Ministry of Digital Affairs suspects that the Chinese Communist Party is behind many of them, although the exact proportion is unknown.
Mr Chiueh explained that China has seven 'cyber armies' – two of which are focused exclusively on Taiwan, while, by contrast, only one is focused on the United States.
In April last year, China established the People's Liberation Army Cyberspace Force – the latest iteration of a cyber warfare military unit, which it runs in secret to maintain 'national cyber sovereignty'.
Mr Chiueh said: 'If you compare cyber attacks with the US and Taiwan federal governments, our government gets seven times the number of attacks.'
The Ministry of Digital Affairs' monthly cyber security report from April found that the most common type of attack was information collection, followed by intrusion, which mostly involved unauthorised access to systems.
One type of intrusive attack that the ministry has followed closely are distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which flood servers with traffic to shut them down.
These attacks have increased six-fold in the last three years, with a notable spike following Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in August 2022 while she was the speaker of the US House of Representatives.
Ms Pelosi was the first high-level official to visit Taiwan in 25 years. China saw the visit as a sign of US support for the island and responded with a wave of grey-zone tactics, which have continued up to now.
'With DDoS attacks, there is a pattern. The attack will begin at 9 o'clock in the morning, then there will be a lunch break from 12 o'clock to 1 o'clock, then the attacker will end at 5,' said Mr Chiueh. 'The working hours are in the same time zone as us.'
Taiwan has also traced the IP addresses of many of the hacks to compromised devices known to be connected to the Chinese military.
The types of information targeted in many cyber attacks also suggests that the Chinese government is responsible.
Chinese hackers have been using 'very sophisticated social engineering', such as phishing software, to target the personal devices of 'specific government officials' and 'collect lots of intel around these people,' said Mr Chiueh.
'The reason they need to collect data is to cyber attack our critical infrastructure or use the information they collect to spread disinformation or misinformation. Both of these are the behaviours of a hostile enemy,' said Mr Chiueh.
Underwater vulnerabilities
While cyber security remains a focus for Taipei, another rising grey-zone threat is the country's undersea submarine cables.
Taiwan relies on 24 underwater cables – 14 international ones and 10 domestic – to carry 99 per cent of its internet traffic.
These cables are normally buried at least a couple of metres below the sea bed to protect them, but Chinese vessels continue to find ways of dredging them up.
Since 2019, there have been dozens of incidents involving Chinese ships – often fishing or cargo boats – which have destroyed the cables and cut off internet access to entire islands.
In 2023, two boats cut the cables providing internet to Taiwan's outlying Matsu Island, leaving 12,000 residents without connection for almost two months.
Beijing has routinely denied any responsibility for these incidents, claiming they were either accidents or that the damages were caused by natural decay.
Mr Chiueh said the likelihood of an attack against Taiwan's undersea cables today is higher than that of a large-scale cyber attack because 'the cost is much higher than to hire a few boats to cut our subsea cables'.
Taiwan has taken measures to deter any kind of destruction. In 2023, after the Matsu incident, Taiwan amended its telecommunications law to criminalise undersea cable attacks with a punishment of one to seven years in prison and a fine of up to NTD$10 million (£250,000).
Last week, Taiwan sentenced a Chinese boat captain to three years in prison for damaging an undersea cable linking Taiwan's main island to the outlying Penghu Islands.
However, stronger punitive action is not the only way that Taiwan has been responding to China's growing pressure – the island has also been improving its own resilience and deterrence capabilities.
Mr Chiueh said that the two cables to Matsu were damaged again earlier this year due to natural causes, yet instead of waiting six weeks, residents were back online almost immediately thanks to new microwave back-ups installed on the island.
Taiwan's ability to deter cyber attacks is also improving. While the number of attacks increased this year, there were fewer breaches compared to last year.
But experts caution that the country still has a way to go. Mr Chang said that if China were to launch a full-scale cyber attack tomorrow, Taiwan would 'definitely be in a lot of trouble'.
'Taiwan has built quite a good capacity in cyber resilience in the past few years, but there are still areas that need to be addressed,' added Mr Chang.
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