HEALTHCARE CYBERSECURITY Landscape
The cure for healthcare’s cyber pandemic
Healthcare: a top target for cyber criminals
The healthcare sector in the United States stands as a cornerstone of the nation’s economy, serving as both its largest contributor and employer, with one in every eight citizens working within it. U.S. healthcare spending currently amounts to approximately 18% of GDP1 and is estimated to reach $6.2 trillion by 2028.2
Despite the anticipated annual growth rate of 15 percent in healthcare cybersecurity budgets, projected to accumulate to a total of $125 billion between 2020 and 2025,3 U.S. healthcare organizations remain vulnerable to cyber attacks. In 2022, 707 U.S. healthcare organizations suffered data breaches, impacting 51.9 million individuals.4
Recent research has indicated that U.S. healthcare organizations continue to have a greater than 90% probability of experiencing some form of cyber attack each year. According to an IBM Security analysis,5 in 2023 the average cost of a healthcare cyber attack was the highest of any industry sector — $10.93 million.
Not just patient records but medical devices too
Connected medical devices are increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks due to the exponential growth in remote access as medical practitioners treat patients via virtual medicine and consumer wearables transmit health-related data to clinicians.
According to recent estimates, there are 10 to 15 million medical devices in U.S. hospitals, with an average of 10 to 15 such devices per patient bed. Globally, the number of connected medical devices is expected to exceed 50 billion in the next decade.6
Older medical devices were not designed with cybersecurity in mind, were never designed to be connected — let alone secured — on today’s digital networks, and are hard to protect. Moreover, the boom in newly connected devices is exposing pre-existing vulnerabilities. Together, these devices pose a significant risk to the delivery of patient care, as attacks on them directly endanger patient privacy and safety.
“We’re building a community to fight cyber crime and protect lives.”
The HEAL Security platform
To counter the ever-growing threats from cyber criminals to patient care and confidentiality, the security of medical devices, and the integrity of hospital, healthcare provider, and associated IT systems, HEAL Security has developed a unique cybersecurity situational awareness solution for the entire healthcare sector: the HEAL Security platform.
Our industry-specific platform continually monitors, observes, and gathers all cyber threat, risk, and research data from a broad range of government, public, and private datasets; orients, classifies, and prioritizes that data in real-time; and converts it into actionable intelligence, alerts, and insights that healthcare organizations can utilize to identify, assess, and neutralize attacks before they infiltrate essential IT systems and impact upon the delivery of patient care.
The HEAL Security platform provides cognitive cybersecurity insights that are missing within the mass of raw healthcare cyber crime data, yielding a higher signal-to-noise ratio in threat detection. It addresses all the critical cybersecurity challenges that organizations are currently facing, which include the threat of data avalanche, disconnected tools, the heavy cognitive burden on time and expertise, siloed industry groups, and the lack of trained cybersecurity personnel (a shortfall of 530,000 individuals in the U.S. alone).7
Importantly, our suite of cybersecurity products and solutions will combat attacks caused by flawed internal practices and the growth in device integration by providing continuous real-time security ecosystem inspection; robotic process automation for healthcare security, human-assisted assessment; analysis-driven remediation to increase speed to action; and proactive advice to prevent an activity before it happens — delivering an intelligent system with self-correcting capabilities.
Powered by cutting-edge technology and led by an international team of information technology security and healthcare professionals, the HEAL Security platform is set to become the leading authority on cybersecurity across the healthcare industry.
- Gunja, Munira Z., Evan D. Gumas, and Reginald D. Williams II. “U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective, 2022: Accelerating Spending, Worsening Outcomes.” Commonwealth Fund, January 31, 2023
- Office of the Actuary, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, “National Health Expenditure Projections 2019-28,” March 24, 2020
- Kostic, Nikola. “Healthcare Cybersecurity Statistics — An Overview.” July 13, 2023
- HIPAA Journal. “2022 Healthcare Data Breach Report.” HIPAA Journal. January 5, 2023.
- IBM Security. “Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022.” IBM. July 27, 2022
- IBM Institute for Business Value. 2021. “State of Medical Device Security: Cyber Risks and Solutions.” IBM. October 10, 2021.
- CyberSeek, “Cybersecurity Supply/Demand Heat Map,” October 2023
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