Cybersecurity incidents are a threat to the healthcare industry as hospitals continue to be valuable targets for attacks. Despite being one of the few industries facing heavy-duty federal privacy regulations (HIPAA), hospitals lag behind other industries, like finance, in protecting patients’ privacy and security.
With data breaches costing the industry $5.6 billion a year and impacting 27 million patient records a year, hospitals have an increasingly urgent need to invest in cybersecurity. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done because healthcare services are complex organizations with an extraordinary level of technology saturation and a long list of internal and regulatory pressures to meet.
Why is cybersecurity such a pressure point for healthcare? It starts because hospitals are such lucrative targets for attackers.
What Makes Hospitals Such Big Targets?
Hospitals are huge targets for hackers for many reasons. First and foremost, they rely heavily on internet-enabled technology for everything from elevators to electronic health records to research, which exposes them to hackers and means providers are cut off at the knees if disconnected. Doctors and nurses who can’t log on physically can’t do their jobs.
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As a result, healthcare teams have an urgent financial and ethical need to get back online – in the battle between paying the ransom and saving patients, the patients win. This assumes that the attackers just hold records ransom. Consider Computer-Aided Design (CAD) use in medical research. The programing is being used for 3D imaging. In 2019, a group of researchers out of Cornell University found it was possible to create malware that attacked 3D medical imaging to trick doctors and specifically said, “an attacker with access to medical records can do much more than hold the data for ransom or sell it on the black market.”
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Source: Gritdaily