Healthcare most favoured target for hackers
scriptwriters of the popular TV series Homeland had hackers kill the US vice president by manipulating his pacemaker to induce a heart attack, viewers dismissed it as science fiction.
Next, when former US vice president Dick Cheney got his pacemaker’s wireless capabilities disabled to prevent potential assassination attempts, people called it paranoia. Now, it’s not science fiction anymore. “Healthcare was the most targeted industry by cyber hackers in 2016, more than finance, government installations, defence and other critical instalments,” Menny Barzilay, CEO, 42 Global, told HT at MEDinIsrael, a conference on medical innovation. “Since 2008, every year a new medical device is being hacked, which is a very real threat to human life,” said Barzilay. Israel is at the forefront of cyber security, with companies such as Adallom offering security technology to track patterns and anomalies that could be potential security breaches for remote servers, including those running Microsoft’s or Google’s cloud services. Hacking threats to pacemakers, defibrillators, intravenous fluid pumps, scanners and hospital networks have led many startups like SenseCy to focus on cyber intelligence tailored for healthcare for more than two years. “Healthcare is an easier target that provides hackers with a lot of valuable information, including social security numbers and personal data, which can be used for identity and insurance fraud,” says Gilad Zahavi, director of Intelligence Operations at SenseCy.
Health records fetch hackers 10 times more than credit card details on the Dark Web.
“Credit card records sell for an average of $2, while medical records fetch $ 20 in the black market because credit cards can be cancelled quickly while social security numbers and personal data can be used for identity theft,” says Zahavi.
Insiders committed over 43% of all privacy violations of patient health records in 2016 and 59% in January 2017, said a report by Protenus.
Healthcare is an easier target that provides hackers with a lot of valuable information including personal data