Health Care Cybersecurity: Costly Data Breaches, Ensuring PII Security and Beyond

Health Care Cybersecurity: Costly Data Breaches, Ensuring PII Security and Beyond

As hospitals get smarter, threat actors have more routes inside. IBM’s recent research on the health care industry shows how smart tools, which could be very valuable for today’s medical facilities, also need healing of their own. What should hospital IT security teams look out for? Our overview of the state of cybersecurity in the health care industry shows what threats are out there and how you can mitigate them.


Why Are Health Care Cyberattacks Significant? 


Who counts as part of the health care industry? It’s a wide field, from companies that offer clinical services, manufacture drugs and medical equipment to related support services, such as medical insurance. These services operate in a web of partnerships including doctors, nurses, medical administrators, government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, medical equipment manufacturers and medical insurance companies.


The industry is broken down into three segments:


Health care providers – hospitals, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers and teaching, research and training centers.
Health care payers – government and private health insurance policies and health care fund services.
Life science – pharmaceutical firms, biotechnology firms and medical equipment manufacturers.

Health Care Cybersecurity Challenges: Costly Data Breaches and a Range of Threat Actors


Figure 1 by IBM. All numbers are in millions.


The average health care data breach costs its victim $7.13 million, the highest cost in 2020 across all industries. That’s almost double the global average. Of these incidents, 80% resulted in the exposure of customers’ personally identifiable information, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report. Just 23% of health care organizations have fully deployed security automation tools. On average, it takes six months to detect a data breach. Beyond that, it takes 280 days on average for an organization ..

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