New report prescribes higher cyber security dose to healthcare bodies

Healthcare organisations look to be emphasising patient data security, often leading to a failure to defend themselves against more serious cyber attacks, according to a recent report.

The Securing Hospitals report shows that cyber security in the healthcare sector to be extremely poor. Specifically, it reveals that hospital security leans towards patient data protection to such an extent that it leads to a vulnerability to more advanced security threats.

The report was conducted by Independent Security Evaluators (ISE), which looked into 12 healthcare facilities, 2 healthcare data facilities, 2 medical device firms and 2 web apps, along with other systems that reside along these networks.

Although the sector is not unaware of the range of potential security threats, it does not perceive the level of sophistication among today’s cyber criminals, says the report. The sector has dated legacy systems, which fails to prepare healthcare organisations for such advanced threats.

ISE executive partner Ted Harrington told SCMagazineUK.com:

“We are not sure why there hasn’t been a publicly disclosed, largescale attack yet. What our research shows is that it is very possible. Our hope is that this research can help the industry proactively try to head off a large scale compromise in the future.”

The healthcare sector need to seriously improve its IT security management if it wants to avoid security threats. While protecting data is crucial and any breach can come with serious consequences, there needs to be someone working in each body with the awareness of, and knowledge to deal with, all kinds of potential threats.