The Vulnerability of the Health Care Industry to Cyber Attacks

Similar to other verticals, the health care industry is vulnerable to cyberattacks that can cause tremendous damage, both to the medical organizations themselves and to their patients.

The Medicare Case and stolen cards details

Just looking at the after-effects of the recent Medicare breach in Australia and other recent data breaches around the world demonstrates just how disastrous this can be. The July 3, 2017 headline in the Guardian read, “The Medicare machine: patient details of 'any Australian' for sale on darknet”. It was revealed that a darknet vendor claimed to have access to any Australian’s Medicare card details and can supply them on request, for the small fee of $30.

As Medicare card details are not publicly available, they are valuable to organized crime groups that allow them to produce fake physical Medicare cards with legitimate information that can then be used for identification fraud. According to the article, identification cards have been used by drug syndicates to buy goods and lease or buy property or cars. The card details could also be used to defraud the government of Medicare rebates.

The Healthcare industry: Data Breaches and Cyber Attacks

Healthcare providers and hospitals have been increasingly targeted for customer and patient data. In 2016, 207,000 records from an unnamed healthcare organization in the US went on sale on the Dark Web for 170 bitcoins (about $110,100 at the time). The same seller also claimed to have close to 397,000 records mostly from Blue Cross Blue Shield and United Healthcare, which was sold for 300 bitcoin (or about $194,000 at the time). The fact that healthcare data bases are very valuable and given the rising demand of such data, the healthcare industry is at high risk for data breaches and different attacks.

Learn more about the different types of cyber threats emanating from the Dark Web that the Health Care industry faces and what can be done about it in the new Cybersixgill Threat report entitled: How Vulnerable is the Health Care Industry to Cyber Attacks. The report can be downloaded by clicking here.