EMRs May Be The Next Hacker’s Prize

Black-hat hackers are beginning, slowly but at an increasing pace, to lock down and encrypt medical data, then demand a ransom fee before they’ll turn over the data in usable form again.

While reports of such activity are scattered and few at the moment, my guess is that we’re at the beginning of a wave of such attacks, especially attacks targeting small medical practices with unsophisticated security set-ups.

Consider what happened recently to a clinic in Queensland, Australia.   Over one weekend, a server holding seven years of patient records was breached and the data encrypted with “military-grade” tools, according to blog Naked Security.

The attackers, who seem to be based in Eastern Europe or Russia, are demanding $4,000 AUD for the release of the records, the blog reports. The clinic is attempting to avoid paying by bringing in its own security experts, but the experts retained by the clinic are apparently fairly doubtful that they can break the encryption scheme.

Such attacks have begun to occur in the U.S. as well, all targeting smaller medical practices with minimal security support.  It’s little wonder that such practices are being targeted; even if they have decent, industry-standard firewalls, antivirus software and password-protected servers — as the Aussie clinic did — such protections are child’s play to defeat if you’re a professional cybercriminal who’s done this kind of thing many times before.

Even if the practice has tougher security in place than usual, how likely is it to have good security hygiene, such as frequently updated and patched firewalls and strong, regularly switched out passwords?  Without security staff on board, not too likely.

Given the devastating consequences that can occur if a medical practice is unable to regain its data, it seems to me that it’s time the entire healthcare industry take an interest in this problem. Smaller practices need help, and we’ve got to figure out how to make sure they get it.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

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