Cyber Threats in Hospitals: Chukwudera Anunagba Moves to Counter the Crisis
By Ugo Aliogo
Every time a patient walks into a Nigerian hospital and surrenders their blood type, their diagnosis, their drug history, and their next of kin, they make an act of trust they have no realistic choice but to make. A new peer-reviewed study by a Nigerian cybersecurity expert at one of Britain’s most powerful financial institutions now warns that trust is being maintained by digital systems which skilled hackers can defeat in less time than it takes a doctor to finish a single consultation.
Chukwudera Obumneke Anunagba, a cybersecurity and technology professional at Barclays in Whippany, New Jersey, is co-author of the study titled “A Review of Zero Trust Security Models and Cost Effectiveness in Healthcare Infrastructure,” published in the International Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Research and Studies (2025; 5(6):2269–2283, ISSN: 2583-049X). His co-authors are Abolaji Adebayo of East Tennessee State University and David Excel Ozowara of Western Illinois University, Macomb, Illinois.
The paper’s core argument is unambiguous. Traditional hospital cybersecurity, the kind that checks a password at login and then trusts whoever is inside the network for the rest of the session, is no longer adequate against modern threats. Anunagba and his colleagues make a detailed, evidence-backed case for adopting a framework called Zero Trust Security, built on one hard, non-negotiable principle: nobody, regardless of who they are or where they are connecting from, should ever be automatically trusted. Every request must be verified. Every session must be monitored. Every permission must be limited to precisely what the immediate task requires and nothing beyond it.
“Healthcare organisations can no longer afford to assume that anything inside their network is safe,” the researchers write. “Every request for access, whether from inside or outside the organisation, must be continuously verified before access is granted.”
To understand why that matters practically, consider how most hospital networks currently operate. A clinician logs in at eight in the morning and the system treats them as safe for the rest of the shift, even if someone else picks up their unlocked terminal, even if they navigate into records unrelated to their own patients, even if their credentials have already been quietly stolen. Zero Trust closes every one of those vulnerabilities simultaneously. It continuously re-authenticates users throughout their session, restricts each person to only what their specific role requires, a principle the paper calls least-privilege access, and divides the hospital network into sealed, independent zones through a technique called micro-segmentation, so that a hacker who breaches one section is immediately contained and cannot move freely through the rest of the system.
“Think of it like a hospital building where every corridor automatically locks between departments,” said Dr. Rotimi Adeyemi, a Lagos-based information security consultant who reviewed the paper’s findings. “Even if an attacker gets through the front entrance, they are stopped cold. They cannot walk from the records department into the pharmacy or the ICU. Zero Trust builds exactly that logic inside a digital network and Nigeria’s hospitals need it urgently.”
The stakes locally are not abstract. As the federal government accelerates the digitisation of health records under the National Health Act and telemedicine platforms expand rapidly across all 36 states, patient data being stored digitally is growing faster than the security infrastructure meant to protect it. IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report places the average cost of a single healthcare breach at $10.93 million, the highest of any global industry for the thirteenth consecutive year. Nigerian health institutions, largely unaudited for cybersecurity compliance, face compounding exposure with every new digital system they commission.
Anunagba’s paper confronts the financial anxiety surrounding large-scale security overhauls directly. Through rigorous cost-effectiveness modelling, the researchers demonstrate that the investment required to implement Zero Trust, covering hardware, software, identity management infrastructure, and staff retraining, is substantially lower than the combined costs of a single major breach: recovery operations, regulatory penalties, legal liability, and the reputational damage that sends patients elsewhere. Automation built into Zero Trust systems also steadily reduces long-term monitoring costs, cutting operational expenditure in a sector where every saved naira can be redirected to patient care.
Looking ahead, the research identifies artificial intelligence and machine learning as the next critical layer, systems that will learn the typical behaviour of every user on a hospital network and raise an automated alert the moment anything deviates, often intercepting a breach before a single file leaves the building.
