Dive Brief:
- A new survey from the Ponemon Institute and ID Experts shows a 125% increase in cyberattacks on healthcare organizations in the last five years.
- For the first time, criminal attacks are now the number-one cause of data breaches in the industry, replacing lost hardware. Forty-five percent of healthcare organizations reported that they had been victims of deliberate cyberattack.
- Ninety percent of healthcare orgs and 60% of claims processors and third-party billers said they had undergone a breach in the last two years.
Dive Insight:
Medical files are worth up to $70 apiece on the black market, yet the industry has still not mobilized itself to adequately face the threat. The Ponemon study reports that employee negligence is still named as the top worry for 70% of organizations. Hackers clock in at just 40%, representing a worrying lag time between the current reality and the past.
"As an industry we can't ignore this stuff anymore," said Texas Health Resources CISO Ron Mehring at the Healthcare IT News Privacy & Security Forum in March. "We've got to pay closer attention to these threats," and we "must prioritize our efforts against them far more than we have done in the past."
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