Healthcare breaches by the numbers

'There are so many ways for the attacker to get inside your environment'
By Bernie Monegain
08:01 AM

Stephen Nardone had just 15 minutes to deliver an impactful presentation Tuesday at the Privacy and Security Forum in Boston.

Nardone, director, security and mobility solutions at PC Connection, a business IT company besed in Merrimack, N.H., is steeped in the ins and outs of health system vulnerabilities, and he used numbers to drive the risk factors home:

  • $6 billion: The cost associated with cyber attacks, attributed specifically to healthcare.
  • 94 percent of healthcare organizations have indicated they've had some type of a breach.
  • Healthcare sustains about two and half times the cost for each record that is lost.
  • Healthcare information is about 10 times more valuable than any other data on the black market: "There's tremendous incentive for breaches to take place."
  • 68 percent of breaches that occurred have been in healthcare.
  • 175.5 million records have been lost.
  • 317 million new pieces of malware last year.
  • 1 million new threats every single day.
  • $4.5 billion was lost in 2014.

"It's not a matter of if you might be attacked or when you might be attacked," Nardone told the audience. "It's you already have been attacked. You just don't know it. They're on the inside.

"So perimeter security, which is really effective – does  a lot of great things for you," he added. "But there are so many ways for the attacker to get inside your environment. Chances are they are in your environment."

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