Friday, May 20, 2016

How DDoS Attack Increase Might Impact the Healthcare Cybersecurity

With a 40% increase in DDoS attacks in the last quarter of 2015, providers should understand how DDoS and web application attacks impact the healthcare cybersecurity.

More agencies experienced multiple distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in the 4th quarter of 2015, which could spell out trouble for healthcare cybersecurity measures, especially for cloud-based services.

According to Akamai’s quarterly State of the Internet: Security report, DDoS attacks are up by almost 40%  across all industries since third quarter of 2015. The total number of DDoS attacks in the 4thquarter of 2015 also represents a 148.85% increase in total DDoS attacks since last year.

During a DDoS attack, an outside party attempts to flood an organization’s systems utilizing a myriad of connections to overwhelm the system. Since the hackers can use programs or bots to generate numerous attacks, organizations cannot block just one IP address from shutting down a specific process.

In terms of healthcare, DDoS attackers can shut down EHR and email systems, which could prevent providers from accessing or communicating critical patient information. There is also an important risk that hackers can inappropriately access PHI through a DDoS incident.

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