Amid growing fears about cybercrime in healthcare, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has released guidelines to healthcare organizations of all types and sizes, ranging from local clinics to large hospital systems.
Strengthening its cybersecurity measures against China and other potential state-sponsored threats, Japan is on track to impose domestic storage of electronic data generated by critical infrastructures like power and water suppliers.
According to some estimates, cybercrime causes 600 billion dollars a year in financial losses. And despite lessons from past incidents, players in all verticals still incur massive damage every year as a result of breaches by hackers.
Despite the risk of tremendous loss in a breach, healthcare providers (HCPs) are slow to build strong cybersecurity defenses around their business.
Nuclear power plants, energy grids, urban water supplies, transportation and traffic control systems, healthcare facilities – these verticals differ in almost every sense, but they do have one thing in common: they are all “critical” infrastructures.
A U.S. House committee has released a staff report that concludes the Equifax breach from 2017 was “entirely preventable.” The report includes many notable findings, including recommendations for the business sector to avoid such incidents in the future.
Mariottt International has suffered what can be considered one of the largest data breaches in history, trailing only the 2013 Yahoo breach. The world’s largest hotel chain said some 500 million customer records were compromised.
Phishing remains a key attack vector for bad actors to compromise not just individual user accounts, but also to establish a foothold in the entire infrastructure of a given organization. This is possible because attackers know one thing very well: a company’s first line of defense, its staff, is also its weakest security layer.
In May 2017, the WannaCry ransomware took copious amounts of data hostage and demanded hefty sums in exchange for the decryption keys. The contagion, allegedly the work of North Korean hackers, spread like wildfire, infecting countless systems worldwide and dealing billions of dollars in damages. Some victims ceded to the attackers’ demands, but few got their data back.
BYOD programs have had a mixed track record over the years. Some say they increase mobility, flexibility, efficiency and collaboration, leading to a more productive workforce overall. Other businesses still shun the practice outright.
Employees’ cybersecurity habits are bad and getting worse. New research illustrates a workforce less committed to security best practices, despite an increased focus on cybersecurity awareness in the workplace.
More than three-quarters of consumers would completely abandon a brand online if they heard the organization were breached by hackers, and around half would not sign up for a new online service that they heard was breached recently.
