Optimum Healthcare IT’s Keith Banks, health care security practice lead, recently weighed in on Security issues and tactics to avoid healthcare cyber attacks in an article on Comptia.org. An excerpt from that article and a link to the full article are below.
In the first half of this year, the health care industry experienced several hundred data breaches – a quarter of total breaches across all industries. By the third quarter, both the Ponemon Institute and Trend Micro ranked health care as the most at risk industry in terms of cyber-attacks globally.
Keith Banks, health care security practice lead at Optimum Healthcare IT in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, said information security is the single most important issue impacting the health care industry today. “Currently, the specific threats of ransomware and phishing rank high on the list of priorities,” Banks said. “Health care organizations need to defend against an evolving threat landscape. To do this requires a team of highly skilled security professionals, which most health care organizations are lacking to the extent required to maintain adequate defenses and meet compliance obligations.”
It’s estimated that 90 percent of health care organizations in the U.S. have suffered at least one data breach in the past two years with the average cost of each breach reaching $2.2 million.
“The risk of a data breach continues to be the biggest issue facing health care organizations,” said Carolyn Luther, an executive consultant at FluidEdge Consulting outside of Philadelphia. FluidEdge provides health care solutions for clients ranging from management to IT consulting. One of the key strategies for consultants like Luther is finding ways to prevent breaches before they occur.
“Breaches can occur in a variety of ways,” she said, “be it external individuals trying to steal data – hacking into networks – or an internal issue that causes data to be released by mistake or an employee committing fraud.”
“An end-user clicks on email and the whole office is affected.”
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