A 60% rise in attempted cybercrime attacks on Irish health services has been recorded over the past two months.

In May 2021, Conti, a Russian-based cybercrime group carried out a ransomware attack on the Health Service Executive (HSE).

The attack led to a forced shutdown of all of the Heath Service's IT systems.

It was the biggest attack on a health system anywhere in the world.

A review of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), was published in October 2021 and concluded that the NCSC was under-resourced and overworked.

ILLUSTRATION - "CYBER CRIME" spelt out with letter-dice lying on a computer keyboard. Taken 18.02.2017. The term computer crime or cyber crime relates to crimes that use or exploit information or communication technology, or attempted attacks on these. - NO WIRE SERVICE - Photo: Sascha Steinach/dpa-Zentralbild/dpa | usage worldwide

Cybersecurity firm SmartTech24/7 CEO Raluca Saceanu said more needs to be done to protect patient data in health organisations.

"Hospitals and other health care organisations, they have computers, they have servers, they have machines in place which run all the operating systems and all programmes," she said.

"Even though the attack happened in 2021, it's not easy to patch these systems.

"They don't get patched as often as they should.

"In some cases, they never get patched, which means they're highly vulnerable to malware attacks."

Ms Saceanu said hospitals "need to raise awareness about phishing threats".

"It's also really important that they're in a position to monitor the systems and in their environments on a 24/7 basis," she said.

"This is to spot an intrusion as soon as it happens and to stop it before it causes damage."