Healthcare Organizations also Come Under Cyber Attacks

As per security research firm SecureWorks, based in Atlanta, healthcare organizations believe that they are facing constant fears of attack from the Internet.

SecureWorks claims that healthcare organizations are working hard to protect their electronic patient data as they have realized the dangers of security breach and its disastrous effects on their reputation and patients.

SecureWorks said that almost an increase of 85% has been recorded in the attempted attacks toward healthcare by Internet. Also, the number of attempted hacks rose from 11,146 per healthcare client per day in the fist half of 2007 to almost of 20,630 per day in the second half of 2007 in January 2008.

Researcher at SecureWorks, Don Jackson, commented on the state of healthcare security and said that healthcare organizations contain a lot of important data and identifiable information like age, names, addresses, and credit card and banking details, as reported by PCWorld on February 27, 2008.

SecureWorks also informed that some of the most searched data is from the patients who are members of some recommended medical networks plans. Thereby, hackers circulate and sell these data as credentials to criminals who specialize in unauthorized immigration.

The researchers also claimed that healthcare organizations unknowingly extends help to attackers by accessing networks which have large number of computing resources like around the clock resources, high bandwidth networks, and systems with many computers connected to them.

Don also claimed that he has witnessed many cases where health insurance credentials are circulated to criminals in counterfeit document racket, especially in South and Central America. He also added that information of credentials is normally stolen by cyber attacks.

Hunter King, another researcher at SecureWorks, said that an increase in application-based attacks influence all organizations - whether healthcare or not, as reported by SCMAGAZINE in the third week of February 2008.

Hunter also added that client side remains more famous with attackers in comparison with hacking an employee's system is much simpler than attacking a complete database of a company.

Hunter also said that the database of a company is more in demand as it enables to easily interact with a backend system of the company. On the other hand, communications flowing from IP (Internet Protocol) address outside the network is often restricted.

» SPAMfighter News - 3/7/2008