The Majority of Healthcare Organizations Have Experienced a Cyber Attack

Published On October 11, 2018

Healthcare organizations, unfortunately, are an especially alluring target for cyber attacks. Cybercriminals are all too aware of the massive amounts of potentially vulnerable personal health and financial information sitting in these organizations.

On top of all that, healthcare organizations also have to worry about the steep compliance penalties if a breach occurs due to the increased regulatory requirements.

Healthcare organizations’ cybersecurity preparedness

A recent IDG survey interviewed healthcare IT decision-makers to better understand their most concerning cybersecurity risks as well as to gauge their preparedness for future attacks.

Here are some key points the survey found:

• The vast majority (86%) of respondents have experienced one or more cybersecurity event. These include malware attacks, external hacks, and accidental data loss.

• The top three cybersecurity risks healthcare organizations are most worried about are identity theft (48%), external hacks (46%), and accidental data loss (46%).

• Of the organizations surveyed, 37% have experienced a ransomware attack and 19% that have experienced a ransomware attack did not block the attack successfully.

Recovering from an attack

In addition to the fact that healthcare organizations struggle to block cyber attacks, they also struggle to recover in a timely manner, the survey found.

More than half (58%) of healthcare organizations that recovered from an attack took days, weeks or even longer to get affected data back to a good state after their most serious security event.

Furthermore, 65% had to revert to data versions that were days or weeks old.

A possible solution to fight cyber attacks

When asked to imagine a valuable solution to fight against and recover from a cyber attack, 73% of respondents said that a cloud-based solution that takes a copy of an organization’s mission-critical data and disconnects it from the network, essentially isolating this data from the network, would be extremely or very valuable.

Furthermore, 79% of respondents said it would be extremely or very valuable if there was a cloud-based solution that also provides a “clean room” to ensure the restored data hasn’t been compromised before it is restored to the network.