Cybercriminals

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Banner Health Cyberattack Impacts 3.7 Million People

Joseph Conn | Modern Healthcare | August 3, 2016

Banner Health is contacting 3.7 million individuals whose personal information may have been accessed in a cyberattack that began on systems that process credit card payments for food and beverage purchases at Banner locations. The breach then expanded to include patient and health plan information. The Phoenix-based health system, with locations in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada and Wyoming, first learned of the attack on July 7, according to a company statement...

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Cybercriminals Hold German Hospitals to Ransom

Charlie Osborne | ZDNet | February 29, 2016

A number of hospitals in Germany have fallen prey to ransomware, disrupting core healthcare services and internal systems. According to German publication Deutsche Welle, several German hospitals, including the Lukas Hospital in Neuss and the Klinikum Arnsberg hospital in North Rhine-Westphalia have become victims of ransomware...

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FBI Agent to CHIME Attendees: The Cybersecurity Environment Is Becoming More Dangerous

Mark Hagland | Healthcare Informatics | August 15, 2016

The level of cybersecurity threat is growing exponentially in healthcare right now, but there are some very clear strategies that the leaders of patient care organizations can and should do in order to fight back. That was the core of the message that Timothy J. Wallach, a supervisory special agent in the Cyber Task Force in the Seattle Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) told attendees Monday morning at the CHIME/AEHIS LEAD Forum Event, being held at the Seattle Marriott Waterfront in Seattle...

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Hackers Exploit Heartbleed To Swipe Data Of 4.5 Million

Erin McCann | Healthcare IT News | December 12, 2014

In the second biggest HIPAA breach ever reported, one of the nation's largest healthcare systems has notified some 4.5 million of its patients that their personal information has been snatched by cybercriminals...

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Health Care in a Post-Privacy World

Someone knows you are reading this. They know what device you are using.  They know if you make it all the way to the end (which I hope you do!).  They may be watching you read it, and listening to you.  They know exactly where you are right now, and where you've been. As FBI Director James Comey recently proclaimed, "there is no thing as absolute privacy in America." Director Comey was speaking about legal snooping, authorized by the courts and carried out by law enforcement agencies, but, in many ways, that may be the least of our privacy concerns...

Healthcare Data Breach Costs Still Highest Among Industries

Elizabeth Snell | Health IT Security | June 15, 2016

The healthcare industry is no stranger to data breaches, and as technology continues to evolve, covered entities and their business associates need to be especially vigilant when it comes to keeping patient data secure. A healthcare data breach is also much more likely to cause significant financial damage than security incidents in other sectors, according to a recent study...

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Healthcare is Now Top Industry for Cyberattacks, New Research Shows

Bill Siwicki | Healthcare Finance | April 20, 2016

Five of the eight largest healthcare security breaches that occurred since the beginning of 2010 – those with more than 1 million records reportedly compromised – took place during the first six months of 2015, according to IBM X-Force's "2016 Cyber Security Intelligence Index." And in 2015 overall, more than 100 million healthcare records reportedly were compromised, the report said...

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Hospitals Paying the Price of Not Investing in IT Security

The fact is, most of healthcare simply doesn’t spend enough on data security. In a study conducted by HIMSS Analytics and Symantec that polled 115 IT and security professionals in hospitals with more than 100 beds, more than half (52 percent) said their organization dedicated between zero and 3 percent of the IT budget to security. Just 28 percent said they spent between 3 and 6 percent of IT budget on security. “All of this makes healthcare organizations rich targets for cybercriminals,” reads the study summary.

Medical Superbugs: Two German Hospitals Hit with Ransomware

John Leyden | The Register | February 26, 2016

At least two hospitals in Germany have come under attack from ransomware, according to local reports. The alarming incidents follow similar ransomware problems at the US Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center. Both the Lukas Hospital in Germany's western city of Neuss and the Klinikum Arnsberg hospital in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia were attacked by file encrypting ransomware, Deutsche Welle reports...

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New Research Shows Attackers Turning to Encrypted Cyber Attacks During Pandemic

Press Release | Zscaler, ThreatLabZ | November 10, 2020

Zscaler, Inc...today released its 2020 State of Encrypted Attacks report, published by the Zscaler ThreatLabZ team. The threat research reveals the emerging techniques and impacted industries behind a 260-percent spike in attacks using encrypted channels to bypass legacy security controls. The report provides guidance on how IT and security leaders can protect their enterprise from the rising trend of encrypted threats, based on insight sourced from over 6.6 billion encrypted threats across the Zscaler™ cloud from January through September 2020 over encrypted channels. To download and read, see the 2020 State of Encrypted Attacks.

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Signatures are No Longer Required for Credit Card Transactions...How Come Most Medical Records Exchanges Still Require Fax Machines?

If you live in the U.S., you've probably had the experience of paying for a meal using a credit card. The server takes your card, disappears to somewhere in the back, does something with it that you can't see, and returns with your card, along with two paper receipts, one of which you need to sign. Everything that happens to me, I think, what is this, the 1960's?As of last week, the major credit card companies -- American Express, Discover, Mastercard, and Visa -- are no longer requiring that signature. As a Mastercard person told CNET, "It is the right time to eliminate an antiquated practice."

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Who Controls Your Smartphone? And How to Leverage Open Source to Prevent it from Spying on You

There are many things about today’s world that warrant us asking that question. Do you or the mobile vendor control your smartphones? If you are a consumer, small or medium business (SMB) -- the answer is the vendor...What if you are a large enterprise or a government agency? The answer is still the vendor...How can the user regain control? Not all vendors have locked devices and walled gardens. Google’s line of Pixel hardware, for example, is a mid-market solution whose bootloader allows locking and re-locking. Pixels support two versions of Android. Google Mobile Services (GMS), where free services are tied to data monetization and a UX like Apple and Samsung devices. Secondly, Pixels can run Android Open-Source Project (AOSP) code that shares the same strengths as the GMS build, but the customer controls the code base and updates. There are several companies that are selling AOSP operating system builds for Pixel and other unlockable/lockable mobile phones and tablets...

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Why Should Hackers Have Easier Access to EHRs than Patients?

Mike Miliard | Healthcare IT News | January 3, 2017

In a Jan. 2 New York Times opinion piece, Eric Topol, MD, professor at the Scripps Research Institute, and Kathryn Haun, a federal prosecutor who teaches a course on cybercrime at Stanford Law, take aim at what they call "quite a paradox": the fact that most patients still can't readily access their own health data, even as there's "an epidemic of cybercriminals and thieves hacking and stealing this most personal information"...

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