The health care industry has a concerning reputation for being among the worst when it comes to cybersecurity. For example, health companies that had been breached in the past year did not discover the intrusion until an average of 270 days after the event. Others had been breached for more than seven years without even knowing it. What’s more, two-thirds of these companies were not informed of the breach internally but instead, were notified by a third-party or the government.
While these facts are alarming and health care companies obviously need to improve these statistics, Richard Clark, former White House cybersecurity czar, explains that there are far worse cyber threats that hospitals should both understand and prepare for:
- Ransomware
- Distributed Denial of Services attacks (DDoS)
- Wiper attacks
- Intellectual property theft
- Straight theft of money
- Data manipulation
- Data destruction