What comes to mind when you think of a breach? If you’re like most people, you think about credit card data and stolen financial information. What you likely don’t think about immediately is breached medical devices, leaked healthcare records, and other data about your medical history.
Over the last few years, attacks against healthcare institutions have become more prevalent. Driving this are several factors, including the dramatic drop in the value of stolen credit card data and the relative ease with which attackers can breach healthcare institutions. All of these attacks have thrust the healthcare industry into the spotlight, and what we’re finding isn’t good.
Let’s discuss the looming perfect storm that I believe is going to cause grief and disaster, both locally and on a national scale, in the coming years in healthcare IT — and what we can do to minimize the damage.
The state of modern healthcare infrastructure
Many of us in the cybersecurity space have warned of the issues in healthcare IT for a long time. From old computer hardware and unpatched operating systems to patchworks of old and new software, not to mention hundreds of different hardware vendors across a single infrastructure, healthcare organizations have very complex environments making the task of securing them a hard job. We’ve been told hospital IT systems run on tiny budgets because hospitals and healthcare run on razor-thin margins. At the same time, hospitals are one of the places that especially can’t afford an IT infrastructure disaster because people’s lives are literally at stake.
Let’s start with infrastructure. In general, healthcare IT has accrued technical debt for more than 25 years. Everywhere you look, whether it’s at the doctor’s office, hospital, or an ..
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