In IBM’s 2022 Cost of a Data Breach report, the company revealed that the global average cost of a data breach was $4.35 million. In the healthcare sector, however, that number skyrocketed to $10.1 million. Why is an attack on a healthcare organization so much more costly? While part of this comes down to the fact that healthcare organizations often have big budgets, and so might be able to pay big ransoms, the biggest part of the answer is consequences. In there, real lives are at stake. Downed
Read More
Ransomware Attacks
Healthcare Considerations: Addressing Cyber Risk in the Healthcare Industry
In 2020, the Dental Care Alliance (DCA) experienced a significant cyberattack on its systems, which lasted approximately an entire month. This gave the threat actor an extended period to compromise the healthcare organization’s servers and extract the private and confidential information of around one million patients. This is just another example of how vulnerable the healthcare industry is to cyber criminals looking to exploit security weaknesses. Healthcare organizations are prime targets
Read More
The Health Data Interoperability Highway Is Coming. Is Your Organization Ready?
Not many of us remember a time when there weren’t interstates widely available to help us get to where we need to go. Winding roads and sleepy towns can be nostalgic, but they’re not great time savers when time is of the essence. At a macro level, The Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) promises to be the interoperability superhighway for healthcare data, speeding information on patients from care facility and care provider — regardless of location or healthcare entity —
Read More
Cybersecurity: Is SOC2 Worth The Hype for Healthcare Organizations?
The healthcare industry has always been a prominent target for cybercriminals worldwide. They can access high-value patient PHI/PII data and use it maliciously to disrupt the patient’s treatment routine and bring down uptime, which is critical. It has repercussions on patients, doctors, hospitals, and everything associated with the healthcare ecosystem. Information security is a reason for concern for all organizations, including those that outsource key business operations to third-party
Read More
Security and Compliance Oversight Will Reduce Business Communication Risk for Healthcare in 2023
Cyber attacks on healthcare organizations are by no means just as simple as hackers going after healthcare data for the sake of obtaining critical data of patients, their families, or the organization's employees. A growing number of these attacks are executed by nation-states and other organized criminal organizations, which have the financial resources and the expertise to launch ever-more sophisticated and costly assaults against these organizations. Some of these attacks have been traced
Read More
Protecting AI’s Boundless Potential in Healthcare
Artificial intelligence can do amazing things for patients, providers and the healthcare business — but only if the right cyber safeguards are in place. For more than a decade, a cybercrime syndicate known as Evil Corp has tormented organizations around the world with malware and ransomware attacks. And now, it seems, the group has designs on healthcare companies. “Evil Corp should be considered a significant threat to the U.S. health sector,” the Health Sector Cybersecurity
Read More
Why Security Misconceptions Are Threatening Healthcare Systems’ IoT Devices
Hospitals and other critical healthcare systems face skyrocketing risks as ransomware attacks—which most commonly target IoT devices—continue to escalate. In 2021 alone, IoT ransomware attack incidents targeting healthcare organizations increased by 123%. While most healthcare systems have a healthy respect for the importance of securing the myriad Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices humming within their facilities, many harbor misconceptions that hamper their abilities to
Read More
Why The Stakes are Higher for Hospitals When It Comes to Data Loss & Inadequate Storage Infrastructure
According to the World Economic Forum, hospitals produce around 50 petabytes of data per year. And with 6,039 hospitals in the US alone, that amounts to a sizeable amount of data requiring secure storage. Data consists not only of confidential patient medical records but also of operational data retained by US hospitals such as personal and financial information. This ever-increasing amount of patient data and growing risks associated with its loss, mean the stakes have therefore never been
Read More
Patching Cybersecurity Gaps in Healthcare, with New FDA Guidelines and Zero Trust
When it comes to protecting patients from the impacts of ransomware, the time has come for the healthcare sector to rethink the way it approaches cyber resilience -- starting with Zero Trust strategies. The unprecedented wave of ransomware attacks on the healthcare sector has upended long-held assumptions about network security. Confidence in traditional methods alone and the philosophies behind them, have been undermined. The ransomware era has become a time of reckoning – particularly
Read More
EMPI/MPI: An End-to-End Approach to Patient Data Integrity
Maintaining patient data integrity is more complicated than ever; cybersecurity threats loom, patients are taking more ownership of their care (self-registration, for example) and health system merger activity is on the rise. It can make the quest for the ever-elusive 1% maximum duplicate rate seem, at times, unattainable. But a secure, accurate, and duplicate-free MPI/EMPI can be achieved. It just requires a multi-pronged approach to protect data throughout its journey into a health system
Read More
