Identifying and Preventing Ransomware Threats in Health Care
Of the five following industries – retail, government, transportation, finance and health care, which do you think represents the highest risk for a cyberattack?
.jpg?width=2780&height=359&name=Security-SML%20(1).jpg)
Identifying and Preventing Ransomware Threats in Health Care
Of the five following industries – retail, government, transportation, finance and health care, which do you think represents the highest risk for a cyberattack?
Security is especially essential for healthcare organizations, as they are a top target for
Wannacry was a warning to the U.S. Healthcare community, the chaos that ensued in the U.K. is a cautionary tale of the effects and severity of healthcare breaches. Over 300,000 companies across 150 countries were impacted by WannaCry ransomware, with the U.K. National Health Serivce (NHS) getting hit particularly hard causing thousands of operations and appointments to be canceled. An interesting note is that the NHS wasn’t targeted specifically, but became victim because its systems weren’t secure. The U.S. is not immune, already this year we have experienced some of the biggest health breaches causing detrimental impact across the board. As the threats continue to swarm, we need to take a hard look at what can be done to improve the U.S healthcare cybersecurity or risk becoming the next headline.
Post sponsored by Veritas
In 2015, more than 100 million health records were exposed*, which means IT security for healthcare providers will continue to be a top priority in 2016 and beyond.
I’m going to start off by being completely honest: The risk for healthcare organizations isn’t getting any better. In fact, we’re now more than five years into the HITECH and Affordable Care Acts, and the risks are greater than ever.
As today’s healthcare organizations look to better contain costs and battle the ever-increasing amount of data, learning to digitize operations becomes crucial to improving organizational efficiency. Although, as healthcare providers digitize their operations, mobile and other endpoint devices’ ability to store millions of records dramatically increases the risk of loss or theft of patient health information (PHI). As we’ve learned from the 11 million patient health records stolen from the recent breach at health insurer Premera Blue Cross, the second-biggest cyberattack in healthcare industry history, and also the breaches the month before at Anthem, patient data can be easily lost or stolen by internal threats or cyber-attacks when loopholes are found.
