How the Healthcare Industry Can Fight Rising Cyber-Attacks

The dangers to the healthcare system are clear in the statistics. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, in 2018, the number of annual healthcare data breaches surged 70% over the previous seven years. In 2017 alone, there were over 500 healthcare industry data breaches, leading to the loss of over 15 million patient records. The start of 2019 has even been worse. Healthitsecurity.com estimates that in just the first six months of this year, over 25 million patient records have been breached and stolen.

And hacking isn't the worst danger. Even greater threats come from ransomware, malware and new types of disruptionware attacks. The healthcare industry is the number one victim of ransomware attacks, with approximately 35% of all ransomware attacks leveled at healthcare sectors. These attacks have devastating effects on healthcare operations, infrastructure usage and patient care. The attacks are also disastrous from a financial standpoint. In 2018, over $8 billion was paid in ransomware damages. Over $3 billion of that amount was paid out to cyber criminals to try to recover encrypted patient data.

'Medjacking'

Cyber-criminals have also fashioned another cyber threat: medical device hijacking, or "medjacking." In 2015, the FBI believed medjacking to be such a hazard that it referred to the hijacking of medical devices as a "ticking time bomb" and issued a warning to the healthcare industry. Today, there are legitimate worries from the World Economic Forum that medjacking attacks could come from not only a cyber-criminal hacker but from terrorist groups and even rogue nation-states.