The cost per patient record
amounts to an estimated $423 per breach.
The health care
sector is notorious for the high cost of its services,
but it could probably save itself a lot of money if it could manage to plug all
the leaks in its cybersecurity.
According to Health IT Security,
hackers are dancing rings around providers and their efforts at security
technology—to the tune of some $4 billion by the end of this year. That’s this
year—just 12 months.
The report cites
Black Book findings that providers in the health care sector are the most
targeted—the cost per patient record, by the way, amounts to an estimated $423
per breach—and some 96 percent of the security professionals surveyed say that
threat actors are running roughshod over
health care organizations.
Indeed, the
security pros said that 53 percent of successful hacks were perpetrated by
outsiders getting in. And 93 percent of health care organizations were hit by a
data breach in the last three years—57 percent being hit more than five times
during that period.
And it’s not
getting any better, counterintuitive though that might seem. According to the
Black Book report “Not only has the number of attacks increased; more than 300
million records have been stolen since 2015, affecting about one in every 10
health care consumers.”
Report authors
added, “The dramatic rise in successful attacks by both criminal and
nation-state-backed hackers illustrates how attractive and vulnerable these
healthcare enterprises are to exploitation. Despite these wake-up calls, the
provider sector remains exceedingly susceptible to ongoing breaches.”
One problem
standing in the way of improvement? Budgets that aren’t expansive enough to
replace legacy systems—yet despite this health care organizations sink about
$1.4 million into recovery from cyberattacks. Oh, and budgetary allotments for
cybersecurity are actually being cut. In fact, less than 1 percent of IT
budgets is earmarked for 2020 resources.
The scary thing is
that so many of these legacy systems are really old, with 56 percent of
providers still relying on Windows 7 operating systems (we’re on Windows 10
now, if you’re curious). And don’t forget that medical devices are also
operating on outdated systems—and providers have a tough time grasping the
concept or execution of software patches.
“It’s becoming increasingly
difficult for hospitals to find the dollars to invest in an area that does not
produce revenue,” said Doug Brown, founder of Black Book. “The situation did
not improve in 2019 and [the] dilemma with cybersecurity budgeting and
forecasting is the lack of reliable historical data.”
Hospitals and doctors are behind the times when it comes to
understanding how and where to fit cybersecurity expenses into their
budgets—never mind the scope of the need, he explained.
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