Tiny Budgets Undercut Healthcare’s Cyber Security Efforts

This has been a lousy year for healthcare data security — so bad a year that IBM has dubbed 2015 “The Year of The Healthcare Security Breach.” In a recent report, Big Blue noted that nearly 100 million records were compromised during the first 10 months of this year.

Part of the reason for the growth in healthcare data breaches seems to be due to the growing value of Protected Health Information. PHI is worth 10x as much as credit card information these days, according to some estimates. It’s hardly surprising that cyber criminals are eager to rob PHI databases.

But another reason for the hacks may be — to my way of looking at things — an indefensible refusal to spend enough on cybersecurity. While the average healthcare organization spends about 3% of their IT budget on cybersecurity, they should really allocate 10% , according to HIMSS cybersecurity expert Lisa Gallagher.

If a healthcare organization has an anemic security budget, they may find it difficult to attract a senior healthcare security pro to join their team. Such professionals are costly to recruit, and command salaries in the $200K to $225K range. And unless you’re a high-profile institution, the competition for such seasoned pros can be fierce. In fact, even high-profile institutions have a challenge recruiting security professionals.

Still, that doesn’t let healthcare organizations off the hook. In fact, the need to tighten healthcare data security is likely to grow more urgent over time, not less. Not only are data thieves after existing PHI stores, and prepared to exploit traditional network vulnerabilities, current trends are giving them new ways to crash the gates.

After all, mobile devices are increasingly being granted access to critical data assets, including PHI. Securing the mix of corporate and personal devices that might access the data, as well as any apps an organization rolls out, is not a job for the inexperienced or the unsophisticated. It takes a well-rounded infosec pro to address not only mobile vulnerabilities, but vulnerabilities in the systems that dish data to these devices.

Not only that, hospitals need to take care to secure their networks as devices such as insulin pumps and heart rate monitors become new gateways data thieves can use to attack their networks. In fact, virtually any node on the emerging Internet of Things can easily serve as a point of compromise.

No one is suggesting that healthcare organizations don’t care about security. But as many wiser heads than mine have pointed out, too many seem to base their security budget on the hope-and-pray model — as in hoping and praying that their luck will hold.

But as a professional observer and a patient, I find such an attitude to be extremely reckless. Personally, I would be quite inclined to drop any provider that allowed my information to be compromised, regardless of excuses. And spending far less on security than is appropriate leaves the barn door wide open.

I don’t know about you, readers, but I say “Not with my horses!”

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

2 Comments

  • There is nothing new about IT bosses -or their bosses, being cheap on anything IT. Lots of reasons, including a lack of understanding of today’s IT needs, let alone those for their firm’s type of business, whether it be banking, manufacturing, or perhaps medical. But given the high value of stolen medical data as previously noted, I think it takes a special grade of mor-n (pardon my bluntness) to think this can be ignored.

    Years ago I had an IT boss who often proved he knew next to nothing about IT. Had no clue why one would have diverse routing of data or system feeds, what backups were for, why you needed decent anti-malware and firewall capability, and far more. I later found out that instead of making systems more robust and useful, let alone secure, he was actually embezzling. Now not all bad IT bosses are doing that, but one sometimes wonders what their actual motivations are – and how they keep their jobs.

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