Stay updated with the latest healthcare cybersecurity trends, news, and tips to protect patient data and comply with medical industry security standards.
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Background for this topic.
Healthcare is the delivery of clinical care and related services through hospitals, clinics, laboratories, pharmacies, insurers, and connected medical devices. It depends on electronic health records (EHRs), patient identity systems, diagnostic and imaging platforms, medication and scheduling systems, and data exchanges between organizations. These environments hold sensitive health and payment information, while the availability and integrity of systems can affect treatment, diagnostics, and patient safety.
Security concerns include unauthorized access or disclosure of records, alteration of clinical data, and disruption of care through attacks on EHRs, connected devices, or third-party services. Defenses require risk-based access controls, strong authentication, network separation where appropriate, secure device and software maintenance, backups that support clinical continuity, and tested downtime and incident-response procedures. Vulnerability management must account for legacy systems and devices that cannot be patched quickly. Privacy and compliance obligations, such as HIPAA in the United States, shape how organizations collect, use, share, retain, and report health information.
With highly sensitive information and disruptions to medical care at stake during cyberattacks on healthcare organizations, it's vital for these entities to carefully consider details of their communications plans well in advance of suffering a serious incident, said Tom Bolitho of FTI Consulting.
Community Dental Care Is State's Largest Non-Profit Serving Medicaid PatientsMinnesota's largest nonprofit Medicaid dental practice is notifying nearly 135,000 people of a December 2024 data theft incident that potentially compromised their health and personal information, ranging from medical information to passport numbers.
Case Resolves HHS OCR Scrutiny of Two Security IncidentsA Guam public hospital has agreed to pay federal regulators $25,000 and implement a corrective action plan to settle potential HIPAA violations - including a failure to conduct a comprehensive risk analysis - identified during an investigation into two security incidents.
Kansas Plastic Surgeon's Patients Allege Privacy Abuses Over Worker's EHR AccessA physical therapist working at a Kansas medical center used his credentials to inappropriately access nude photos of hundreds of breast augmentation patients of an unrelated plastic surgery clinic over two years - until he was fired in 2023, a proposed class action lawsuit claims.
Landmark Admin Compromise Affects More Than a Dozen Insurance and Annuity CarriersLandmark Admin, a third-party vendor that provides administrative services to life insurance and annuity companies, said 1.6 million people are potentially affected by 2024 ransomware and data exfiltration incidents that compromised a wide range of personal, financial and health information.
A new remote access trojan (RAT) called 'ResolverRAT' is being used against organizations globally, with the malware used in recent attacks targeting the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors. [...]
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new, sophisticated remote access trojan called ResolverRAT that has been observed in attacks targeting healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors
ResolverRAT targets healthcare organizations using advanced evasion techniques and social engineering