HEALTHCARE CYBERSECURITY Landscape
Healthcare is under cyberattack
HEAL Security’s Cognitive Cybersecurity Intelligence platform is revolutionizing cybersecurity for the healthcare industry
Healthcare cybersecurity is an urgent issue that affects every one of us. The global healthcare ecosystem is under sustained attack from cybercriminals seeking to steal patient records, disable life-saving medical devices, or infiltrate critical IT systems to extract illegal payouts.
Healthcare: is a primary target for cybercriminals
There were approximately 784,626 organizations operating in the U.S. healthcare sector alone in 2020. According to the American Hospital Association,¹ there are 6,129 U.S. hospitals. The sector is the largest contributor to the nation’s economy and its largest employer, with one in eight citizens working within it. U.S. healthcare spending in 2021 is estimated to have grown to $4.3 trillion and is expected to increase by 5.1% each year between 2021–2030, reaching $6.8 trillion (19.6% of GDP) by 2030.²
Despite spending $65 billion on cybersecurity defenses over the past five years,³ an industry report identified that between 2017–2020, a staggering 93% of U.S. healthcare organizations experienced a data breach⁴ (an increase of 58% in 2019–2020 alone). 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 a recent IBM Security analysis,⁵ in 2022, the average cost of a healthcare cyberattack was the highest of any industry sector — $10.10 million ($7.13 million in 2020).
Not just patient records but medical devices too
In 2021, more than 45 million U.S. individuals were affected by healthcare cyberattacks;⁶ and in 2020 (the latest year for which figures are available), data breaches cost health sector organizations a total of $13.2 billion.⁷
That figure excludes attacks on connected medical devices, which are increasingly vulnerable 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.
Another IBM report⁸ estimates that there are currently 10 to 15 million medical devices in U.S. hospitals and an average of 10 to 15 connected devices per patient bed, and the number of globally connected devices is set to exceed 50 billion in the next decade.
Older medical devices were not designed with cybersecurity in mind, were never intended 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 cybercrime and protect lives.”
The HEAL Security platform
To counter the ever-growing threats from cybercriminals 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 cybercrime 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 some 3.5 million individuals in the U.S. alone).
Importantly, our suite of cybersecurity 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 with initial support from UnitedHealth Group and Health2047, the venture arm of the American Medical Association, the HEAL Security platform is set to become the leading authority on cybersecurity across the entire global healthcare industry.
- American Hospital Association: Fast Facts on U.S. Hospitals 2023 https://www.aha.org/statistics/fast-facts-us-hospitals
- https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/press-releases/cms-office-actuary-releases-2021-2030-projections-national-health-expenditures
- Cybersecurity Ventures: Healthcare Security $65 Billion Market https://cybersecurityventures.com/healthcare-cybersecurity-report-2017
- https://www.sentinelone.com/blog/my-hospital-caught-a-virus-how-healthcare-is-sick-with-cyber
- IBM Security Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022: https://www.ibm.com/security/data-breach
- Critical Insight: Healthcare Data Breach Report https://www.criticalinsight.com/resources/news/article/critical-insight-finds-35-percent-increase-in-attacks-on-health-plans-in-2021-end-of-year-healthcare-data-breach-report
- Bitglass: Healthcare Breach Report http://www.bitglass.com/press-releases/2021-healthcare-breach-report
- IBM Institute for Business Value: Medical devices are vital, but vulnerable https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/en-us/report/medical-device-security#
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