Cyber-attacks are increasing day by day. For a developed organization, the rate of getting infected is very high. Compared to other institutions cyber-attacks are increasing steeply targeting the health care sector. One of the main reasons is that health care staffs are so busy in the time of pandemic. They don’t have enough time and resources to create awareness among the staffs on how to spot and tackle the cyber-attacks.
Due to this reason, the health care organizations have decided to invest on cyber security. But today’s hackers are so powerful that they find or create a loop hole to enter into the servers of the hospitals. So the hospital officials find it difficult to take a proper decision.
Let’s look at the main reasons why health care institutions are regularly being targeted
The informations of the patients can buy hectic amount of money
Hospitals maintain records of every patient in their servers. These records are worth a lot of money. They can either be used for personal purpose or can be sold out. It is the responsibility to safeguard the private records of the patients.
Professionals gave out opinion that the hospitals must install strong security solutions and also enable multi-factor authentication.
Medical equipments are an easy way for the attacker to get into their networks.
Hospitals are being modernized by using latest technology including machines like heart rate checker, X-rays, insulin pumps etc. These machines are designed and developed with the sole purpose of helping the doctors to analyse patients. But sometimes these devices act as a bridge between the attacker and the hospital server. The cyber-criminal hacks these devices and launch attack on the servers or networks which has the personal information of millions of people.
Data privacy is low. Data access is granted for more than one employee
Hospitals are a place where people work collaborately. So one cannot ensure who will be using which system and who are the one that are accessing the information. So there is no consistency in handling of information. This drawback is often utilized by the hacker to leak information by infecting the network and compromising each system one by one.
Hospital authorities are still working on the oldest version of software
Hospitals are always busy and the employees are indulged in their works without any pause. Patients and emergency cases will be coming constantly. So hospital authorities do not have the time to check the validity of the softwares and to update them. These people are working on tight schedule and with critical deadlines. The out-dated softwares often contain vulnerabilities which are utilised by the threat actors to infect the servers and hijack the datas.
Healthcare staff is not given proper training about online risk
Medicals staffs are given better training in the field of medicines and care taking but little do they know about how to identify a cyber-attack and to mitigate them. Since the cyber security applications are complex to work on, there should be a quick and easy cyber security solution for the medical staffs. They must be given a basic training on how to protect the patient’s data. Easy and viable security software like MFA and SSO are getting into hospital practices slowly.
Increased number of devices used in hospitals
Hospitals are being modernized and the number of patients is increasing day by day. Equally the number of staffs increases, due to which the number of systems used are also increased. So, there can’t be single network for every device. Basically all these devices are connected to a single network. The danger lurking here is that if a single system is compromised, the malware spreads to the entire system through the connected network. Since the hospital staffs are not well aware about the attacks and strategies, the hacker will in fact take his necessary data and leave the place without being noticed by anyone.
Information is often open and sharable
In case of an emergency patient, his data will not be stored confidentially in the servers. It will be open to every staffs of the hospital because if the condition of the patient goes worse and the doctor who treated him is not available in the shift, there must be records which are easily available to determine the current status and the medication process of the patient. This helps the duty doctor to perform the needful. This situation is taken for granted by the hackers. Open systems are easy to infect and steal information.