While industry reports claim ransomware attacks have dropped, cybersecurity insurance company Beazley Breach Response (BBR) Services has reported otherwise. According to businesses benefiting from its insurance deals, there has been a surge in the number of reported ransomware attacks, especially in September, when incidents nearly doubled from a month earlier.
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The healthcare industry is among the top targets of cyberattacks, especially since the internet of things found its way into the industry and completely revolutionized it. After healthcare’s share of ransomware attacks in 2017, and a great deal of data theft, phishing and more ransomware in 2018, cybercriminals gradually switched methods, tapping into the cryptojacking space.
More than 1.4 billion data records are estimated to have been compromised in 2016 as a direct result of data breaches, spawning an 86 percent increase compared to 2015, according to a Gemalto’s Breach Level Index. With organizations continuously being targeted by cybercriminals either with sophisticated advanced threats or through infrastructure vulnerabilities, the main driver behind these attacks is often related to financial gains or gratification.
In the recent post, Healthcare Security Lapses: No Signs of Slowdown, we discussed just how big the challenges are to securing healthcare data. To get a sense of what healthcare providers may be doing that are hampering their efforts, we turned to a long-time hospital chief information security officer, Eric W. Cowperthwaite. Cowperthwaite served at Seattle–based Providence Health & Services as its first Chief Information Security Officer for more than seven years. Cowperthwaite also served as the first Information Security Officer of Medi-Cal (California’s Medicaid program), where he established a formal information security program.
