I don’t know how much more we can continue talking about healthcare data breaches. This is again a multi week of data breaches in the healthcare industry, and again over and over. With Anthem Inc. and then again with Premera Blue Cross, and Advantage Dental, all announced they had data breaches, however nothing about if there data was encrypted.
How can 80 million and then 11 million then finally 150,000 patient records all in a month or so get exposed? Have we become so sure that we will not be a target to hackers and insider threats? The question now is not if, but when will a data breach happen. This is even more common in the healthcare industry.
Just by looking through the list of blogs that we have written alone, covers a lot about how we can help the healthcare industry protect PHI against being exposed. This is not only against outside attacks, but also to malicious and accidental insider threats. What is the reason behind this? The reason is that we protect the data itself, no matter where it is.
In addition, many states are very close to imposing regulations and laws to protect patient health information. They will also penalize organization that deal with this information and do not have the proper protection against such attacks.
It’s time to also not focus on the perimeter as for the past couple years, that perimeter can no longer be defined as it has become so wide. Meeting the proper steps to protect sensitive information of this nature must currently be paramount to all healthcare organizations.
Making sure that data is DRM protected, as this can prevent hackers from accessing the data even after the data has been stolen.
Remember the new threat even now is that your data is under attack. Even at this very moment it could be with all the recent APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) attacks. Don’t ignore the threat as it has become very real at a big scale.
Picture Credit: Adrian Clark
