What You Should Know: - Cybercriminals have been highly successful in their ransomware attacks on healthcare organizations, according to a new survey conducted by Sophos. “The State of Ransomware in Healthcare 2023, report reveals nearly 75% of the surveyed healthcare organizations reported that their data was successfully encrypted by the attackers. - In addition, only 24% of healthcare organizations were able to disrupt a ransomware attack before the attackers encrypted their
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Healthcare Ransomware
How Healthcare Organizations Can Defend Against Ransomware
There’s no denying it - the need for stronger cyber defense is urgent. More ransomware attacks targeted healthcare in 2022 than any other critical infrastructure sector, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). With attacks on healthcare negatively impacting patient care – including increased mortality rates - healthcare organizations must adopt proactive approaches to better protect their patients and sensitive information. In the spring, the Multi-State Information
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EMPI/MPI: An End-to-End Approach to Patient Data Integrity
Maintaining patient data integrity is more complicated than ever; cybersecurity threats loom, patients are taking more ownership of their care (self-registration, for example) and health system merger activity is on the rise. It can make the quest for the ever-elusive 1% maximum duplicate rate seem, at times, unattainable. But a secure, accurate, and duplicate-free MPI/EMPI can be achieved. It just requires a multi-pronged approach to protect data throughout its journey into a health system
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What Healthcare Leaders Need to Do Now About Ransomware
If ransomware is not a topic of conversation around any healthcare organization’s boardroom table, directors and senior executives may be exposing the organization (and themselves) to considerable risk. Here’s a guide to ransomware trends for 2022 and steps healthcare leaders can take to help protect their organizations. Ransomware trends in 2022 The risk of a ransomware attack in 2022 is substantial, with gangs specializing in targeting the healthcare sector. Last year saw dozens of
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Why Ransomware Poses a Threat to Both Providers & Patient Health
Ransomware attacks continue to wreak havoc on all types of organizations across almost every industry. The healthcare sector in particular has emerged as one of the top targets for ransomware gangs, and the impact can be more dire than for most others. According to new research by Tenable, ransomware is responsible for 46% of all data breaches in the healthcare sector, compared to 35% of data breaches across all verticals. Just last month, a major hospital in Maryland lost access to a
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Death by Ransomware: Poor Healthcare Cybersecurity
If hackers attack your organization and you’re in an industry such as financial services, engineering, or manufacturing your risks are mostly monetary. But when it comes to healthcare cybersecurity, not only is there significant financial jeopardy, people’s health and wellbeing are also at risk so the stakes are much, much higher. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, there has been an almost 50 percent increase in healthcare cybersecurity data breaches between February
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Hackers in Healthcare: What Damage Could They Do With Your Medical Data?
Conversa Health’s Scott Anderson provides a brief take on the state of data security in healthcare.The wave that is big-data doesn’t appear to be cresting in healthcare anytime soon, and unfortunately, neither are the threats waged against it. Hijacking and hacking into personal health information (PHI) has become a growing trend that’s here to stay. So, the question remains: what should be done about it?The last couple of years have unveiled a fair share of data breaches in healthcare: in 2017,
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Protecting Medical Device Security in the Age of Ransomware
From medication pumps to pacemakers, people depend on lifesaving devices to live their healthiest possible lives and manage chronic ailments. Many of those patients likely hear about cybercriminals orchestrating massive data breaches, and might get concerned about one of those incidents compromising their information.However, they probably haven’t considered the hackers might target the devices in their bodies or the ones they otherwise use for better well-being.Hospitals Must Pay Attention to
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Healthcare Cyber Hygiene: 5 Best Practices to Protect Patient Data
Hospital-acquired infections and data breaches may have vastly different causes, but they have one thing in common—they put healthcare organizations and patients at risk. The “pathogens” which cause data breaches originate both externally and internally—but practicing healthcare cyber hygiene can reduce or eliminate their “infection."Patient data has high value—to others. According to Verizon’s 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report, healthcare has the second highest number of breaches after
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4 Leading Health IT Trends That Will Continue in 2018
Several notable trends from 2017 will continue to impact the health information technology (HIT) industry in the new year. Ransomware tops the list, particularly after this May’s WannaCry worldwide cyberattack, followed closely by increased awareness of electronic prescribing of controlled substances (EPCS) as an “upstream solution” to battling the nation’s mounting opioid abuse crisis. Beyond the ongoing development of these two leading trends, HIT experts are also asking two key questions as
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