According to a study by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, the majority of security officers and IT professionals employed in the health care industry feel the the importance of security in health care institutions has gone up.
Around 87 percent of the 297 study respondents said that business priorities have changed in recent years. Around two thirds of the respondents reported that the institution they worked at had seen a significant breach recently, and some of those breaches resulted in the loss of important patient data. The study results come only a couple months after the FBI sent a notice to health care institutions that their current security measures were not enough to content with growing cyber crime.
“The healthcare industry is not as resilient to cyber intrusions compared to the financial and retail sectors, therefore the possibility of increased cyber intrusions is likely,” The FBI stated according to Reuters.
Demand for information from the health care industry is high among criminal markets. Unlike credit or debit card information, which is realized and reported quickly, healt hcare information is frequently stolen, bought and sold before it has been noticed or reported stolen. This is a major contributing factor to the popularity of stolen health care information among cybercriminals. Health care patient information is the target of most of the attacks in the industry. The information can be used to impersonate patients to obtain controlled substances, or it can be used to commit financial fraud.
To combat the growing health care cyberattacks, the FBI is urging health care institutions to improve their cybersecurity to protect patient and institution data.
How to protect a healthcare facility
Protecting a health care facility isn’t easy. The large number of computers with valuable patient information makes it difficult, but a layered solution is the best option. Faronics’s Endpoint Layered Security provides several different ways of protecting health care systems and Deep Freeze is there to ensure that nothing goes wrong.
Faronics’s solutions can be applied easily to all computers in a healthcare facility, from mobile workstations for nurses and staff to administrator computers or even patient registration computers. The central management function of Faronics’s solutions makes it easy to control and handle all of the machines that the Deep Freeze is installed on. With over 30,000 customers, many of them in the health care industry, Faronics has proven to be a great solutions provider for managing and keeping systems secure.
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