From medication pumps to pacemakers, people depend on lifesaving devices to live their healthiest possible lives and manage chronic ailments. Many of those patients likely hear about cybercriminals orchestrating massive data breaches, and might get concerned about one of those incidents compromising their information.However, they probably haven’t considered the hackers might target the devices in their bodies or the ones they otherwise use for better well-being.Hospitals Must Pay Attention to
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Healthcare Security | Cyberattacks | HIPAA Violations | Ransomware | News, Analysis, Insights
Global Healthcare Cybersecurity Spending Expected to Exceed $65B Over 5 Years
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
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Evolving Hacker Behaviors to Disrupt Healthcare Services
Most people don’t spend much time thinking about what complex organizations hospitals are. Whether anticipating the joyful arrival of a newborn baby or worrying about an unexpected illness or injury, hospital visitors aren’t usually thinking about cybersecurity. Even most hospital employees only see a piece of the big picture, with little reason to consider operational risk.But lots of people are indeed losing sleep over cyber threats to patient safety — IT administrators and clinical engineers
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Survey: 69% of Healthcare Providers Plan to Transfer More Health Data to the Cloud
Despite the security risks, 69 percent of healthcare organizations plan to transfer more sensitive data to the cloud in the near future, according to the 2018 Netwrix Cloud Security: In-Depth Report for Healthcare. The report reveals that most healthcare providers store sensitive data, such as electronic protected health information (ePHI), personally identifiable information (PII) and financial data, in the cloud, yet only a few of them have pervasive visibility into who is accessing that
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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
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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,
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Ransomware Leads the Way in 2017’s Predicted Rise in Health Data Theft
Editor’s Note: Santosh Varughese is the President of Cognetyx, a provider of ‘Ambient Cognitive Cyber Surveillance’ to protect information assets against cyber security threats, data breaches and privacy violations. Welcome to 2017, the writing is on the wall and it didn’t take long to get there. Earlier this month Atlanta’s Emory Healthcare was hacked by the Harak1r1 the 0.2 Bitcoin Ransomware. A database from the facility’s Brain Health Center containing data from more than 200,000 patients
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New HHS CyberSecurity Initiative: Too Little, Too Late?
Editor’s Note: D’Arcy Guerin Gue is a co-founder of Phoenix, with over 25 years of experience in executive leadership, strategic planning, IT services, knowledge leadership, and industry relations — with a special focus on patient engagement and federal compliance issues. She currently serves as the Director of Industry Relations at Phoenix Health Systems, a division of Medsphere SystemsAfter years of increasingly dangerous data security and privacy breaches across the American healthcare
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Newsflash: Healthcare Does Not Spend Enough on IT Data Security
Mathematically, the gap between $3.6 million and $17,000 is a chasm.This is something you know well if you’re Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, which paid the latter number to unlock patient data held hostage by malicious hackers using ransomware when the former number is what the hackers initially asked for.While the dramatic reduction in ransom may have caused Hollywood Presbyterian to breathe a sigh of relief, there is no reason they or you should feel comforted. Consider this an initial shot
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Hospital Cyber-Attacks Could Be Mitigated through Higher Education
Editor's Note: J.A. Eve Krahe, Ph.D. is the dean of graduate programs for University of Phoenix School of Health Services Administration. Prior to joining University of Phoenix, she served as the director of health care innovation programs at Arizona State University.
In his comments to the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in September 2015, Brian Dishman of Intel Corporation described the “constellation” of health data that surrounds each of us. From diagnostic,
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