Cost of Healthcare Security Breach in Could Reach $4B as Hackers Exploit Vulnerabilities
Hikvision Covers Cybercrime Exploits of Backdoors in Healthcare
A new study found that healthcare IT professionals believe their efforts to protect vulnerabilities are being outpaced by hackers, covered in the Security magazine article, “Healthcare Data Breaches Will Cost $4 Billion by Year's End.”
The survey, conducted by Black Book Market Research, interviewed more than 2,800 security professionals from 733 organizations to identify vulnerabilities that impact security breaches in healthcare.
The study found that IT security budgets in hospitals have remained steady since 2016. Additionally, only four percent of surveyed healthcare organizations have established a steering committee to evaluate the ROI of cybersecurity investments.
Additional research findings included:
- 21 percent of hospitals reported having a dedicated security executive on staff.
- 94 percent of respondents said they did not change their cybersecurity precautions following their last breach.
- 40 percent do not conduct an assessment of their current cybersecurity status.
- 41 percent have not formalized security objectives in a strategic plan, an improvement over 2018 (60 percent).
“The key place to start when choosing a cybersecurity vendor is to understand your threat landscape, understanding the type of services vendors offer and comparing that to your organization’s risk framework to select your best-suited vendor. Healthcare organizations are also more prone to attacks than other industries because they persist at managing through breaches reactively and not proactively,” said founder of Black Book, Doug Brown, in the announcement.
Read more about the study at this link.
Hikvision Covers Cybercrime Exploits of Backdoors in Healthcare
Hikvision discusses backdoor exploits in healthcare in this HikWire blog: “Cybercriminals Exploiting Vulnerabilities in Healthcare Organizations,” which highlights results of a healthcare IT network report covered in a SecurityInfoWatch.com article. Here’s an excerpt from the blog:
“Gaps in policies and procedures can result in errors by healthcare staff members. Examples of these errors include improper handling and storage of patient files, which is a soft spot for cybercriminals when they target global organizations and industries looking for weaknesses to exploit.”
Report findings also included the following:
- Hidden HTTPS tunnels were a common attack method in healthcare networks. As described in the article, it’s an “external communication involving multiple sessions over long periods of time that appear to be normal encrypted web traffic.”
- Data smuggling was the third most detected method for hiding malicious data transfer (DNS tunnels came in first, smash-and-grab second).
- The article urges healthcare organizations to continue monitoring for ransomware attacks; however, the report discovered ransomware attacks had decreased in the second half of 2018.
For additional cybersecurity articles by Hikvision, visit this link.