Healthcare data sets — from patient records to information about medical practitioners — hold a level of detailed personal information that has a new generation of hackers salivating. A breach can do enormous damage, and for the unprepared can manifest itself in several different ways:
- Ransom: Hackers will encrypt medical information and demand that hospitals pay a ransom before restoring their system access.
- Identity theft: Hackers will steal critical medical information and often sell it on the black market for potentially millions of dollars.
- Intellectual property theft: Hackers will steal information having to do with ongoing clinical trials, or about new products, and then scrub all related information from the hospital system before selling the information on the black market for big money.
- Hospital system access: Hackers will gain access to hospital systems simply to wreak havoc, whether that’s by disabling equipment, playing around with critical devices like pacemakers, or cutting power.
Hospitals and public institutions are increasingly targeted as hackers focus on the vulnerabilities that are inherent in public institutions, like open physical environments, outdated diagnostic equipment, and the opportunity for user error. Those, combined with the EHRs, system connectivity, and the implementation of potentially unsecured IoT devices, make governments, healthcare, and quasi-governmental agencies vulnerable targets.
Is your organization prepared for the Big Hack in healthcare? On Wednesday, March 20, 2019, join ITWC CIO Jim Love and Mark Gaudet from the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) for Preparing for the Big Hack in Healthcare. In this one-hour webinar, Love and Gaudet will discuss the rising threat to healthcare organizations from an increasingly sophisticated and organized breed of hacker. This session will include:
- An overview of Canadian cybersecurity threat data collected by CIRA’s D-Zone DNS Firewall, which is currently protecting hospitals around the country. This data will underline the risks, highlight the vulnerabilities, and identify the trends CIRA is observing in large and small institutions.
- Case studies of real breach incidents and how (and why) they could have been prevented with a layered defence strategy.
- A discussion around what you can do now to prepare for a future where you may be hackers’ primary target
Register now for Preparing for the Big Hack in Healthcare.