Cybercriminals are growingly aiming healthcare institutions and victoriously deploying malware and ransomware to exploit hospitals' requirement to recover rapidly.
Here is a look at the significant reasons cybercriminals are aiming at healthcare institutions.
Healthcare is historically not very protective
In the year 2009, Congress approved the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act that needed hospitals to turn from paper to electronic health records (EHRs). With this came a flood of new health information technology and concerns that some of these vendors were bypassing security measures in order to get their products to market rapidly, leaving the already newly digital healthcare institutions open and susceptible to cyberattacks.
It is life or death.
Because lives are at stake, healthcare experts and their sufferers often cannot afford to have systems down or wait for an incident response team to come in and clean up the mess. This makes them important targets for ransomware attacks. They often pay the ransom in case to get their systems back up and running.
The data is lucrative.
In addition to being ripe for the ransomware-picking because of the need for fast recovery times, hospitals also house a lot of private data. When cybercriminals steal a sufferer’s healthcare records, they are often capable to acquire various pieces of information: social security number, medical history, insurance contributor, the patient's medications, and so on. There is a larger concentration of sensitive information.
An application-heavy environment offers a broad attack landscape.
In accordance to the Duo Labs report, Duo Security healthcare clients are logging into twice as various applications as the average user in other industries. This in itself is not a security risk or issue, but more diverse systems ... [may] need them to utilize old systems which could put them at threat of attack.
They have an affinity for Windows and out-of-date browsing.
The healthcare industry is yet using out-of-date, legacy systems. The report found that 82 percent of healthcare agencies are using Windows, and 76 percent are running on Windows 7
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