Global healthcare cybersecurity spending is expected to exceed over $65 billion dollars over the next five years, according to Black Book’s annual healthcare cybersecurity survey. According to 88 percent of hospital representatives surveyed, IT security budgets have remained level since 2016. As a percentage of IT organizational budgets, cybersecurity has decreased to about three percent of the total annual IT spend.Budget constraints have encumbered the practice of replacing legacy software and
Read More
healthcare security breach
Healthcare Cyber Hygiene: 5 Best Practices to Protect Patient Data
Hospital-acquired infections and data breaches may have vastly different causes, but they have one thing in common—they put healthcare organizations and patients at risk. The “pathogens” which cause data breaches originate both externally and internally—but practicing healthcare cyber hygiene can reduce or eliminate their “infection."Patient data has high value—to others. According to Verizon’s 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report, healthcare has the second highest number of breaches after
Read More
Survey: 4 in 5 Physicians Experienced Cyberattacks In Their Clinical Practices
More than four in five U.S. physicians (83 percent) have experienced some form of a cybersecurity attack, according to new research released today by Accenture and the American Medical Association (AMA). The key findings reveal physicians see need for the healthcare industry to increase cybersecurity support for medical practices in their communities. More than half (55 percent) of the physicians were very or extremely concerned about future cyberattacks in their practice. In addition,
Read More
Healthcare’s Password Prognosis
Editor’s Note: Dean Wiech is the Managing Director of Tools4ever, a global provider of access management and governance solutions. Dean has worked with healthcare organizations, educational institutions, municipalities for more than 20 years, helping them identify solutions that make their businesses and operations more secure, efficient and easier to manage. Passwords are everywhere. The headlines might tell us otherwise, but their death, and the exaggeration of such, means that they are and
Read More
CHIME-KLAS Study: Cybersecurity A Central Concern for Healthcare C-Suite
Cybersecurity has been elevated to a central concern for healthcare providers, with more attention at the board level and the C-suite, according to a new survey by KLAS Research and the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME). For the study, KLAS conducted nearly 200 interviews of chief information security officers, chief information officers, chief technology officers and other security professionals on provider adoption of and experiences regarding specific
Read More
Healthcare Ransomware: Why Providers Should Not Pay the Ransom
Editor's Note: Dean Wiech is the Managing Director of Tools4ever, a global provider of access management and governance solutions.Healthcare is simply in the crosshairs of some really nefarious people. You’d have to be living under a rock to have missed the comments on everything that has been happening in the sector. The daily headlines include such news as “Hospital declares State of Emergency after ransomware infection”; “Hospital pays ransom to get data back”; “Dangerous escalation in
Read More
Should Hospitals Consider Getting Cybercrime Insurance?
Naturally, most of what you hear from healthcare IT companies about their products is going to be upbeat, designed to create a sense of potential and promise. I mean, I can easily extol the virtues of the company I lead and the products and services we sell.But if I’m responsible and realistic, I also need to call attention to the challenges healthcare IT can create on the path to improved care. Without doubt, any information technology that creates, maintains, or transmits electronic patient
Read More
Data Breaches: Moving Security Perimeter Back to Server Level
Editor's Note: Jon Senger is the CTO of Vertiscale . He writes frequently on the on the topic of HIPAA compliance and the role of MSPs in healthcare security.The leading cause of data breach incidents in healthcare facilities is lost or stolen end-user devices, including laptops and tablets. Such breaches have led to six figure fines for HIPAA violations in some cases, and with the stepped up enforcement coming in 2016 promised by the Department of Health and Human Services, we can expect to
Read More
MedStar Cyber Attack Shows Need for HHS to Implement Cybersecurity Law
The FBI is investigating a Monday cyber attack by anonymous hackers that forced MedStar Health's 10 hospitals and more than 250 outpatient centers to shut down their computers and email. After the cyber attack was discovered, the provider immediately made the decision to take down all of their systems as a precaution to ensure further security breaches. The Washington, D.C.-based healthcare system employs more than 30,000 people and treats hundreds of thousands of patients in the Washington
Read More
Senate & House Committee Leaders Demand Answers on 316 Security Breaches on HealthCare.gov
Republican committee leaders in the Senate and House today asked the administration for information about the 316 security breaches on HealthCare.gov catalogued in a new report released by the nonpartisan government watchdog, the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Between October 2013 to March 2015, HealthCare.gov had 316 security incidents, including 41 which involved personally identifiable information.
The GAO reported that HHS does not have complete records of how many people these
Read More
