Cyber Attacks on Health Data — Rising Significantly

Hackers like grabbing healthcare information from doctors and hospitals and other medical care facilities. That information is quite valuable as a commodity on the dark web. For example, it can be used to file false Medicare claims and for identity theft. 

 POLITICO did an analysis of data from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and found that in 2021 close to 50 million people had health data stolen by hackers. That’s three times what was hacked in 2019.

Hacking is a much bigger share of the data breaches now than in 2016:

2016 — 35%

2017 — 41%

2018 — 45%

2019 — 61%

2020 — 69%

2021 — 74%

2022 — 82%

Except for South Dakota, every state in the union saw attacks. Half of the states say at least 10% of their residents were impacted by such thefts. Most breaches — 75% — were done by hacking. That’s up 35% since 2016.

Most of the successful attacks are attributed to these factors:

The healthcare industry rapidly moving to storing information digitally

Remote working by employees

More personal devices being used for work

More awareness of attacks by the industry

 Whatever the cause, the unauthorized access to this data costs healthcare businesses — and consumers — billions of dollars each year.

 POLITICO also analyzed the number of people who’ve had their data compromised in each state. Here is the percentage of residents in each PIA Western Alliance state that have been exposed to a health data breach:

Washington — 16.2%

Oregon — 23.1%

Montana — 8.4%

California — 10.9%

Idaho — 8.2%

New Mexico — 53.5%

Arizona — 5.2%

Nevada — 47.5%

Alaska — 68.5%

Source Link: Politico