The Column – Cyber Security Week
On 11 and 12 March 2026, numerous international sources confirmed the cyber attack suffered by Stryker, a large company in the medical sector. The claim came from the pro-Iranian group Handala, which presented the operation as retaliation linked to the conflict between the United States and Iran and the company’s alleged ties with Israel. According to what was declared by the attackers and relaunched by various newspapers, over 200,000 devices including servers, laptops and smartphones would have been remotely reset, while around 50 terabytes of data would have been stolen. Experts have indicated the attack vector to be the use of administrative access in Stryker’s internal Microsoft environment, exploited to issue mass deletion commands. The company admitted global disruptions to orders, production and shipments, while maintaining that connected clinical products are isolated from the affected network and safe for use. The US authorities are now collaborating to clarify the scope and implications of an episode that marks an important transition: companies are increasingly explicitly in the landscape of cyber conflict. Up to this point the news, now some considerations. There is something profoundly modern, and therefore profoundly disturbing, about the idea that a large healthcare company could be cyber-attacked in retaliation for a military attack. The news about the Stryker attack shows just that. In the classic story of war there were the front, the rear, the civilians, the industry. Today these lines resemble those drawn on the sand when the water arrives. If a hostile group decides to attack a company because it considers it part of a larger conflict, then the perimeter of the war widens to include what produces, distributes, connects, stores data and guarantees continuity. In other words: everything.
Technically the most interesting, and least cinematic, aspect is that there doesn’t seem to be a traditional ransomware script here. The problem is no longer just malware as a foreign body, the recognizable monster that bursts through the window, but an attack that passes through legitimate tools used illegitimately, as in the “best practices” of current technological attacks. The distinction between normal operations and aggression becomes thinner and almost disappears.
Then there is another point that deserves attention. Stryker reassured that the clinical devices are isolated and that patient safety has not been compromised. This is important news, and even comforting, but it must not lead us to make the opposite mistake, that of minimisation. When orders, production and shipments stop in a global healthcare supply chain, we are not faced with an administrative hassle. We are faced with the demonstration that operational continuity is now part of real security. It is not enough for the surgical robot to remain theoretically safe if the entire framework that allows it to arrive, be maintained, supported and integrated becomes impaired. In the information society, the damage no longer coincides only with the object affected, but with the network of dependencies that keeps it standing.
The market, with its usual brutality, understood this in a few hours. The decline in the stock on the stock market does not only measure a financial loss: it is the numerical translation of a sudden lack of confidence. Investors, who often seem romantic only when talking about innovation, become fiercely realistic in the face of fragility. And they do well. Because every such incident reminds us of a truth that we continue to remove: the more digitally powerful an organization is, the more it lives hanging by a fiber strand. Nice to look at, very useful as long as it stays on, but just pull the right one and the darkness reaches rooms that are very far from each other.
The lesson, then, is not that we should be afraid of technology as nineteenth-century farmers were afraid of the train. That would be nonsense. The lesson is more uncomfortable: we must stop thinking that efficiency means control and that digitalization means maturity. Often it just means well-organized addiction. And in the case of health infrastructures this dependence has a further specific weight, because it touches the most sensitive part of collective life: care. When geopolitics enters the information systems of a company operating in that world, it isn’t just attacking a brand or a balance sheet. It is measuring how much we are willing to admit that hospitals, suppliers, manufacturers and their software are now part of the same battlefield.
For years we have described the Internet as a very convenient highway. In reality, in many cases, it is already a border and it does not become less dangerous just because we cross it with a login instead of a passport. True fragility begins when we call an accident what now resembles a form of war. Networks don’t bleed, but they make the world bleed no less than bombs.
