The State Of Healthcare Cybersecurity (Part 1)

Healthcare data has never been under more outside threats than it is today. For a number of reasons, this data has become more attractive to cybercriminals and can be sold on the dark web for a pretty penny. Not only that, emerging threats like ransomware attacks are hitting home and wreaking havoc with the institutions they target.

Unfortunately, according to a new study by Black Book Market Research, healthcare organizations don’t seem to be adequately prepared for this onslaught.

The survey, which collected responses from more than 2,464 security pros working at 680 provider organizations, found that health IT leaders aren’t confident they can defend themselves against cyberattacks. In fact, 96% of IT professionals who responded said that the attackers are significantly ahead of them and could probably cut through the protection their organizations have in place.

Given that stat, it’s not surprising that over 90% of healthcare organizations have seen a data breach since Q3 2016. Worse, almost 50% reported that they had more than five data breaches during this period. Not only that, more than 180 million records have been stolen since 2015, a staggering haul which affects roughly one in every 12 healthcare consumers.

On the surface, it might seem surprising that healthcare organizations haven’t toughened their defenses given the number of threats they face. Actually, they are, but they’re being outgunned. It’s not that they’re not making cybersecurity investments, but both the level of investment and their strategy for deployment may be inadequate.

In a surprisingly frank set of disclosures, one-third of hospital executives that bought cybersecurity solutions between 2016 and 2018 said they did so blindly without much vision or understanding of what they were getting for their money. Respondents said that 92% of data security product and services buying decisions were made at the C-level, and the process didn’t include any users or affected department managers.

One reason that C-level executives with little relevant knowledge are making security investment decisions because they don’t have anyone senior to consult – and the problem is extremely common.

The survey found that 84% of hospitals responding had no dedicated security executive in place. Most say that it’s difficult to recruit a qualified chief security officer, which is why they’re going bare on data security and stumbling through the buying process as best they can.

Some organizations are responding to the shortage of C-level tech talent by outsourcing the function. Twenty-one percent said they outsource security to partners, consultants or selected security-as-a-service options as a placeholder.

Given this interest in outsourcing, healthcare organizations are signing deals with security services and outsourcing companies five times more often than they’re buying cybersecurity products and software. Vendors, in turn, are responding by diversifying the portfolio of services they offer. Still, that’s unlikely to be enough over the long term.

All of this suggests that the healthcare industry is in a security crisis. I’ll offer more details on the situation in part two of this series.