Hacking, IT incidents leading cause of data breaches
Health care companies need to take steps to protect themselves from malicious actors.
The increase of remote work in 2020 rapidly accelerated the adoption of cloud computing and employees using their own devices, introducing new vulnerabilities to health care organizations, according to a report from Bitglass, a cloud security platform.
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From 2014 to 2018, the causes of health care data breaches were roughly level. However, even though organizations have gotten better at protecting records from being exposed when devices are lost or stolen, they are losing the fight against hackers. Since 2017, hacking and IT incidents have been the leading cause of breaches, and have doubled since 2018.
“The vast majority of health care organizations process and store protected health information (PHI) such as Social Security numbers, medical history and other personal data,” Bitglass acknowledged in its 2021 report on health care data breaches. “Unquestionably, this draws the attention of malicious entities that can compromise sensitive data and use it for monetary gain.”
There were 599 health care breaches in 2020, up more than 55% from 2019, the report found. Hacking and IT incidents accounted for over two-thirds of those, and the damage is extensive. More than 91% of records involved in a health care breach were exposed, about 24 million records and 2.3 million people.
The average cost of those breaches increased slightly — from $429 to $499 — but the cost in time is significant. It takes about 236 days for a health care firm to recover from a breach, and about 96 days just to recognize a breach has happened.
Bitglass urges health care organizations to adopt comprehensive platforms “designed to secure any interaction between any devices, apps, web destinations, on-premises resources, or infrastructure.”
Populous states like California and Texas led the country in breaches, with 49 and 43 of the breaches in 2020, respectively. However, Bitglass noted that breaches were up in 37 states. Michigan led the country in number of individuals affected, but that’s largely due to a single breach at Trinity Health, which impacted 3.3 million people.
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