16 Mar Healthcare enters new cybersecurity era as hacktavists, organized crime, foreign nationals take aim
While there’s evidence that organizations are better controlling data loss, today’s attackers are becoming much more targeted and sophisticated.
Organized criminals scoped their sights on healthcare somewhere around 2012 and found that stealing patient data enabled them to monetize that information in a number of ways. Since then attacks have grown increasingly sophisticated ever since. And attackers are launching attempts now than ever.
Perhaps coincidentally that’s also when the stream of lost unencrypted hardware began slowing down, said Kurt Long, CEO of application security specialist FairWarning.
“That’s not to say that laptops don’t still get lost, but the peak years for that were 2008-2012,” Long determined. “I don’t know that lost laptops were all that damaging. It could be in the bottom of the Hudson River. We don’t know where that data went.”
But since healthcare organizations have to publicly disclose those incidents, whether the information was actually exposed to criminals or not, the industry swallowed a steady diet of headlines about data breaches.