Queensland Health plans to implement measures to protect against "phishing", including employees reporting suspicious emails and enhanced capabilities to analyse and block threats.

The government wants the phishing program rolled out to the Gold Coast Hospital and Health Service by March 23, ahead of the Games, and at all sites by April 4.

Shortly before the Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Pyeongchang, its official website stopped working, with officials confirming it was hit by a cyber attack.

A Queensland Health spokeswoman said its cyber security group worked to proactively prevent, detect and respond to cyber threats.

"Evidence shows cyber attackers target high-profile events to cause maximum disruption and obtain maximum publicity, as witnessed by the recent cyber attacks at the opening of the Winter Olympic Games," she said.

Griffith Criminology Institute senior lecturer Jacqueline Drew said government agencies, including hospitals, were targets for attacks because they held key information, including names, birth dates, addresses and contact details.

"Identity information is valuable to a criminal. It can be used by the person that is harvesting information to commit identity fraud," she said.

"[Or] that identity information is sold, often through the dark web, to other groups who would then use that information to commit identity theft."

Dr Drew said phishing attacks could include emails that tricked users to click on a link to a fake website that would steal login credentials, or malware that installed keylogger software, which recorded keystrokes and sent the information back to offenders.

"Offenders have become very good at impersonation ... It makes it difficult to tell between authentic and fake emails and websites - they look almost identical," she said.

"Scams can be very sophisticated, they can have a lot of technology behind them, so it's becoming very much more difficult, without having education, to know that something is a scam."

Dr Drew said most successful breaches of highly protected systems, like government agencies, were as a result of human error, rather than a forced attack through hacking.

In 2016, the US Department of Homeland Security issued a warning about the proliferation of new ransomware variants, with hospitals and healthcare facilities among their targets.

Ransomware is software that infects a computer and restricts users' access until a ransom is paid to unlock it.

Queensland University of Technology emeritus professor Bill Caelli said disgruntled groups could target high-profile events, such as the Commonwealth Games to spread their message.

In May 2017, five of Queensland's biggest hospitals suffered from major IT problems after efforts to prevent a possible cyber attack backfired.

Authorities had installed security patches in response to a global ransomware attack that affected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide, but the patches caused system slowness.