Throughout 2017, healthcare organizations’ ability to protect their data and be proactive in detecting data breaches continued to be a problem. According to the 2017 Breach Barometer report from Protenus, in collaboration with DataBreaches.net, 5.6 million total patient records were breached last year spanning across 477 reported breach incidents.
The report also revealed that there were 176 insider-related incidents; it took 308 days, on average, for organizations to discover a breach; and hacking incidents that included ransomware or malware doubled from the previous year.
This is why it’s no surprise to hear what Mac McMillan, chairman, CEO and co-founder of Austin, Texas-based consulting firm CynergisTek, has to say about the evolution of healthcare cyber attacks. “[The year] 2017 saw new attacks, bigger attacks, and attacks against things that we hadn’t considered before on the scale that they were, such as the NotPetya and WannaCry [incidents]. We also saw the evolution of attacks, going from ransomware to the disruptive model we have today, which is very effective. And the attackers know that it’s effective; that’s why they’re doing it.”
McMillan recently spoke to Healthcare Informatics Managing Editor Rajiv Leventhal about other cybersecurity lessons he learned in 2017, what trends he’s looking out for in 2018, and how his firm handles calls from healthcare organizations that have suffered a breach.
The podcast runs under 15 minutes in length, and remember, you can listen to all Healthcare Informatics podcasts right here.
