Just how bad a year was 2017 for health data? According to one study, it was 5.6 million patient records bad.
According to health data security firm Protenus, which partnered with DataBreaches.net to conduct its research, last year saw an average of at least one health data breach per day. The researchers based their analysis on 477 health data breaches reported to the public last year.
While Protenus only had 407 such incidents, those alone affected 5,579,438 patient records. The gross number of exposed records fell dramatically from 2016, which saw 27.3 million records compromised by breaches. However, the large number of records exposed in 2016 stems from the fact that there were a few massive incidents that year.
According to researchers, the largest breach reported in 2017 stemmed from a rogue insider, a hospital employee who inappropriately accessed billing information on 697,800 patients. The rest of the top 10 largest data breaches sprung from insider errors, hacking, and one other incident involving insider wrongdoing.
Insider wrongdoing seems to be a particular problem, accounting for 37% of the total number of breaches last year. These insider incidents affected 30% of compromised patient data, or more than 1.7 million records.
As bad as those stats may be, however, ransomware and malware seem to be even bigger threats. As the study notes, last year a tidal wave of hacking incidents involving malware and ransomware hit healthcare organizations.
Not surprisingly, last year’s wave of attacks seems to be part of a larger trend. According to a Malwarebytes report, ransomware attacks on businesses overall increased 90 percent last year, led by GlobeImposter and WannaCry incidents.
That being said, healthcare appears to be a particularly popular target for cybercriminals. In 2016, healthcare organizations reported 30 incidents of ransomware and malware attacks, and last year, 64 organizations reported attacks of this kind. While the increase in ransomware reports could be due to organizations being more careful about reporting such incidents, researchers warn that the volume of such attacks may be growing.
So what does this suggest about the threat landscape going forward? In short, it doesn’t seem likely the situation will improve much over the next 12 months. The report suggests that last year’s trend of one breach per day should continue this year. Moreover, we may see a growth in the number of incidents reported to HHS, though again, this could be because the industry is getting better at breach detection.
If nothing else, one might hope that healthcare organizations get better at detecting attacks quickly. Researchers noted that of the 144 healthcare data breaches for which they have data, it took an average of 308 days for the organization to find out about the breach. Surely we can do better than this.
