In a pandemic-ravaged world, biological viruses are not the only ones you should keep an eye out for. Social distancing and protection measures have become more advised and frequent since the Covid-19 pandemic, cybersecurity on the other hand is often taken for granted; consequently, cybercrimes targeting health care institutions have risen significantly since then.
According to Forbes, the reported exploits in health care institutions have mounted 42% in 2020, which resulted in data breaches for more than half of last year’s patients. Another report from The Wall Street Journal, states that “every month last year more than 1 million people were affected by data breaches at health-care organizations.
Cybersecurity in healthcare; why is it important?
Similarly, to any organization or company that seeks to protect their data from malware or cyberattacks, health care organizations should keep their systems and data secure from any theft or corruption which would ultimately be extremely costly to fix. Perhaps the most common healthcare stakeholders are the patients, with their data and private information in the wrong hands, they could be at a huge risk of blackmailing or identity theft, and not to mention the healthcare workers themselves are also thrown into the bargain.
Cyberthreats can take various forms, the most common being ransomware, as a device gets infected its data becomes encrypted and as the name suggests, a ransom is imposed to decrypt and recover the data. The promise of recovering the data, however, is very questionable and could never happen as this ransomware is also accompanied by malware that not only steals credential data but also wipes the entire disk drives clean making the data unrecoverable.
In today’s smart-world, most devices connected through a network can be remotely controlled, comparably to home-automation, hospital machines and devices are in jeopardy of being hacked and the cost then becomes a human life. To protect your devices from such incidents, trustworthy Antiviruses are advised to keep your devices and patients safe.
Healthcare security measures
Countless measures can be taken to protect your healthcare organizations, and the more initiatives taken in doing so, the safer your data will be. Some of the basic ones are setting up:
- An Antivirus, and keeping it up to date to detect and remove new threats.
- A firewall is vital to prevent hackers from mining credential data
- Incident response plan, a planned course of action is important to have at the ready in case of a cyberattack
- Data encryption, so that hackers who pass beyond the firewall will not be able to read or understand the data
- Cloud-based backups of files and data in case of damage to the physical hard disks
- Security awareness training for staff and employees, to disregard suspicious emails or links that could be malware packed.
More sophisticated methods are also quite recommended, and some would encompass setting up penetration testing or more commonly known as “ethical hacking”, where your organization would hire a ‘hacker’ to test their cyber defenses by hacking through but also providing feedback to make it more difficult for malicious hackers to do so. As previously mentioned, in addition to having an incident response plan, tactical strategies powered by automation and artificial intelligence should also be in order as security teams alone cannot take it upon themselves to protect against cybersecurity.
Ultimately, as hospitals turned a blind eye to cybersecurity while being busy with the surge of covid patients, cyber threats and data breaches have dramatically increased. Their prime motive being the money, of course, hackers can demand millions for data ransom or selling ‘identity kids’ made up from patients’ medical records and personal information. With all that being said, cybersecurity is not to be taken lightly especially in healthcare organizations that have had a red target on their backs.
