Evidently, healthcare enterprises are forced to deal with a new challenge, a heavy rise in cyber attacks of varying nature. Therefore, it is critical to ensure vital medical devices, devices, and infrastructure are secure and are turned less vulnerable to cyber attacks.
The increase in cyber-attacks on healthcare enterprises seems to be fuelling growth in mortality rates. Statistically, there has been a more than 20% increase in death rates. These are critical findings of a study by the Ponemon Institute.
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The most common cyber attacks on healthcare enterprises include phishing, ransomware, cloud security, and supply chain.
As an immediate consequence of such attacks, many patients’ conditions deteriorated due to delays in procedures.
Of all these, ransomware has been quite disastrous. Data obtained from healthcare enterprises confirm that ransomware caused test or procedure delays in 64% of cases. Furthermore, around 59% of patients had to stay longer in the hospital.
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In-house expertise is another concern for healthcare enterprises in case such an error occurs. Also, several healthcare services complain they are constantly facing the problem of expert staff.
More focus and investment are needed by the current healthcare systems towards ensuring cyber security.
“We’ve seen healthcare providers purposely request IT to provide less secure but easier forms of 2FA, so there is less friction between them and their critical job functions. It is the responsibility of the healthcare IT organization to invest in proactive secure measures such as disaster recovery, endpoint detection and response, and email security”, says Monnia Deng, Director, Product Marketing, Bolster.