A Ponemon Institute Patient Privacy and Data Security study sponsored by ID Experts says that the increased use of smartphones and tablets is significantly increasing the risk of cyberattacks in the health care industry. It links the risk to these devices to not having proper malware and virus protection. The study also indicates that there has been a 100 percent increase in attacks in these types of organizations since 2010.
According to the study nearly 75% of the healthcare organizations that responded, believe that employee negligence is the biggest security risk. These same respondents to the study believe that more than 50% of their employee’s devices are not secure. Fewer than 25% of the organizations surveyed require employees to install antivirus or anti-malware software and even fewer organizations require a scan of the devices prior to allowing the devices to connect to the organization's network.
Approximately 88% of healthcare organizations allow employees to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). Besides the BYOD risks, these organizations face public cloud service use abuse and frequent cyber attacks.
Healthcare organizations' confidence in the Health Information Exchange systems that have been set up to share healthcare information between providers, hospitals and the government is very low. Almost 75% of organizations rank their confidence in these systems to either ‘somewhat confident’ or ‘not confident’. Many participants in the study say that security and privacy risks have actually increased due to unsecure exchanges of information between healthcare providers and the government as well as unsecure databases, or unsecure websites.
"The study also found that healthcare organizations continue to struggle to comply with increasingly complex federal and state privacy and security regulations," according to Ponemon.
The Ponemon Institute is based in Traverse City, MI.
ID Experts is based in Portland, OR.
