Escalating Cyberattacks Threaten US Healthcare Systems

Imagine a hostile nation-state with your psychiatric records. Or an organized crime ring with your child’s medical file. Or a disgruntled employee with your medical insurance information.

It’s scary but true. Cyber criminals—from unhappy employees to the most sophisticated hackers—are targeting healthcare data, findings from the Fifth Annual Benchmark Study on Privacy & Security of Healthcare Data indicate. And no healthcare organization, from an 18-bed county hospital in Illinois to healthcare insurer CareFirst to insurance giant Anthem, is immune to these attacks. Without fear or favor, these criminals want to hack into healthcare systems to seize your medical data either to make a profit or to expose the security vulnerabilities of the U.S. healthcare system.

For money-hungry criminals, healthcare records are a treasure trove of easily accessible information. According to the FBI, criminals are targeting the healthcare sector because individuals’ personal information, credit information, and protected health information (PHI) are accessible in one place, which translates into a high return when monetized and sold.

“Credit cards can be say five dollars or more where PHI records can go from 20 say up to—we've even seen $60 or $70,” says Jim Trainor, second in command at the FBI’s cyber security division.

The motivations are more complex for politically-minded criminals. The most recent Sony breach became a model of many of the new risks surrounding cyberattacks and the resulting data breaches: disruption of business operations; intellectual property theft; public embarrassment; damaged relationships with business partners, clients, and employees.

The recent Anthem breach reveals an additional threat. There was speculation that organized cybercriminals may hold healthcare records for ransom, demanding payment for not releasing the information online or to other criminal groups. And in healthcare breaches, where lives can literally be at stake, no provider can afford to ignore a threat of compromise to patient healthcare records.

The many faces of criminal attacks
Healthcare records are prime targets for criminals because they recognize that healthcare organizations lack the resources, processes, and technologies to prevent and detect attacks, and thus protect patient data. It’s no surprise, then, that criminal attacks are up 125 percent since 2010, according to benchmark study data. For the first time, in fact, criminal attacks are now the number one root cause of data breaches, rather than user negligence/carelessness or system glitches.

The Ponemon study found that criminals are using a variety of methods to access healthcare records, from spear phishing to web-borne malware attacks to exploiting an existing software vulnerability. According to John Riggi, the FBI’s Cyber Division Section Chief, criminals often use personal social media profiles to craft highly effective spear phishing attacks, a tactic that occurred in 88 percent of healthcare organizations in the Ponemon study as a means for gaining access. They then simply “phone home” while escalating privileges and building a network map. Once data is exfiltrated, they use the Dark Web to monetize the stolen information.

Riggi also said that cyber threats by both nation states and organized crime are growing, most typically from Eastern Europe, Russia, China, and Iran. As James Comey, director of the FBI, has said, “There are two kinds of big companies in the United States. There are those who've been hacked by the Chinese and those who don't know they've been hacked by the Chinese.”

Despite these growing threats, half of all organizations have little or no confidence in their ability to detect all patient data loss or theft. In addition, only 40 percent of covered entities and 35 percent of business associates are concerned about cyber attackers.

This lack of concern is reflected in a lack of appropriate budget. CBS News referenced a 2014 survey of healthcare technology professionals, in which half of respondents spent three percent or less of their technology budgets on cybersecurity. The standard investment is 10 percent, experts say.

Tom Turner, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Bitsight Technologies, an organization that rates companies on cyber security, said he is “absolutely” worried about the security of his own health care records.

“Healthcare is absolutely performing at the bottom of the other industries,” Turner told CBS News. "If you'd like a letter grade for that, maybe a C or D.”

Highly motivated criminals are realizing and exploiting the political and financial value of healthcare data, putting patients’ medical and financial health in jeopardy. Unless healthcare organizations become as adept at protecting patient data as criminals are at attacking it, we could experience a tsunami of healthcare data breaches and medical identity theft the likes of which we’ve never seen. This is just the tip of the iceberg.