Cybercrime has certainly been one of those buzzwords thrown all over the media. Intelligence agencies all over the country have warned that cybercrime is on the rise. All the headlines in the news make us insensitive to the fact that our situation is getting worse. The problem is in healthcare, there are lives at stake!
What exactly is cybercrime?
A dissection of the term cybercrime suggests that it refers to something illegal. And something that involves computers. While this definition is not too far off, it misses a lot of what cybercrime is and is becoming. A better starting point to understand this rather complex phenomenon, we’ll start with a working definition as any crime that is facilitated or committed using a computer, network or hardware device.
Your Cybercrime Costs
By far the most widespread type of crime across the past decade, cybercrime has grown past all other elicit organized crime all together.
Who is paying the price?
Probably it’s no surprise that cybercriminals are frequently targeting healthcare facilities. Medical records are the most sought after information bought and sold on the Dark Web. Have you ever encountered someone in need of a surgery that they couldn’t afford? What about elective surgery they’d like to have, but no insurance to do so? I’m sure you can appreciate that there are some people out there desperate enough to impersonate someone else—having bought their medical identity online—to get the work they need or want done.
A single medical record is worth way more than a credit card, social security, or other personal data. Why? As I already mentioned, people really use these records to get surgeries they need.
But, a second important why is lingering out there… Medical records do not change. What I mean by this is a doctor or nurse is not going to change someone’s medical identity. It is essentially fixed. You can change a credit card number quite easily—report some fraud and get issued a new card. For medical records? Not so easy.
Also, medical billing is a slow process. If you ever experienced a compromised credit card, have you noticed that the banks at this point are calling you to inform you of fraudulent charges? They have algorithms that predict your spending habits and are instantaneously alerted of suspicious activity.
Medical records or medical identity impersonation remains difficult to detect. How long does it take to get a bill back from the doctor? A month? Two? What about insurance reimbursements? The snail’s pace of processing has made medical record sales on the Dark Web extremely lucrative.
To answer the question who is paying the price?
You are. Your community is. Your patients are. We all are paying the price to healthcare cyberattacks—especially when an attack successfully compromises real data. Data the might lead to some of your most vulnerable patients being denied care because of fraudulent history that they had nothing to do with.
Can you live with the price of not having security measures that actually keep those records secure? Concerned about your network? Consider a ransomware vulnerability assessment
