The Healthcare Vertical Is Rife With Error And Misuse

Ashish Thapar, Managing Principal and Regional Head – APJ, Verizon in an interaction with Sanjiv Das, elaborates on the alarming rate of breaches in the healthcare sector, its impact and ways to prevent it

- Sanjiv Das

2019 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) is built upon analysis of 41,686 security incidents, of which 2,013 were confirmed data breaches. Amidst this, how many incidents were reported from the health sector?

Unfortunately, there has been a surge in the number as well as the size of cyber-attacks in the healthcare sector. Out of 2,013 breaches, about 15 per cent are from the healthcare sector. The statistics below have been gathered from DBIR 2019 on the healthcare sector:

-- Frequency 466 incidents, 304 with confirmed data disclosures

-- Top 3 patterns Miscellaneous errors, crimeware and privilege misuse represent 81 per cent of incidents within healthcare

-- Threat actors 42 per cent external, 59 per cent internal, four per cent partner and three per cent multiple parties (breaches)

-- Actor motives 83 per cent financial, six per cent fun, three per cent convenience, three per cent grudge, two pre cent espionage (breaches)

-- Data compromised Medical 72 per cent, personal four per cent, credentials 25 per cent

What was the methodology used to collect the data? How many countries/focus areas were taken into consideration while going in for collecting the data?

The collection method and conversion techniques differed among contributors. In general, three basic methods (expounded below) were used to accomplish this:

-- Direct recording of paid external forensic investigations and related intelligence operations conducted by Verizon using the VERIS (Vocabulary for Enterprise Risk and Incident Sharing) Webapp.

-- Direct recording by partners using VERIS.

-- Converting partners existing schema into VERIS.