WILLEMSTAD - Curaçao’s healthcare providers are being urged to strengthen digital protections after the Cybersecuritybeeld Nederland 2025 revealed a dramatic rise in ransomware attacks affecting medical labs, hospitals, and diagnostic systems across Europe.
One of the most serious incidents involved the theft of 941,000 patient records from a major medical laboratory following a ransomware attack.
The stolen data included highly sensitive information such as names, addresses, personal identifiers, medical research results, and even data relating to politicians and vulnerable groups.
Implications for Curaçao
While the attack occurred in the Netherlands, Curaçao’s healthcare system uses many of the same European vendors for laboratory processing, cloud services, and diagnostic platforms.
A breach at a shared vendor could easily affect Caribbean health institutions.
Medical Sector Increasingly Targeted
The report confirms that hackers—both criminal and state-sponsored—now regularly target hospitals and labs because of:
valuable personal data
outdated or fragmented IT systems
dependency on uptime for urgent medical care
Curaçaoan officials say reforms and upgrades will be necessary to protect patient data in a rapidly evolving threat landscape.