Data Breaches in Healthcare
Inside actors pose the biggest threat of attack for health insurance, hospitals and private practices, either unintentionally or maliciously.
15%
Of all data breaches occur in healthcare organizations
62%
Of data breaches in healthcare come from within
$408
Average cost per lost or stolen record
$3.68M
Average total cost of a data breach
6.4%
Average total annual cost increase
$14
per record is saved with Incident Response team and Right Tools.
Types of Data Breaches
Malicious Threats
Breaches stemming out of bad intent are in a way the most dangerous, as they can be the most challenging to detect quickly and therefore unbelievably costly. They may be motivated by a desire for personal gain, either through selling sensitive data on the black market, using patient lists when starting a private practice or offering information about high-profile patients to media outlets. The last can either be solely for financial gain or a political statement as well, as was the case with Hilary Clinton’s patient information. The breaches also occur as revenge due to dissatisfaction, which could lead an employee to leak confidential information online or destroy it, or even curiosity about a patient who is a friend or family member.
Unintentional Threats
Accidental breaches usually occur without the individuals involved being aware of it, though this makes them no less dangerous, as healthcare institutions remain accountable. Such breaches are usually the result of an employee’s lack of knowledge or education on proper security policies and procedures, a mistake arising from an employee attempting to multitask in hectic working conditions, or a typing accident while sending a fax or email. Relying on the human factor in the effort to avoid accidental data breaches is futile, as the variables are too great in number and too unpredictable.
A particular kind of unintentional threats are those arising out of negligence, as they have the additional factor of irresponsibility and laxity on the part of an inside actor. These usually pertain to carelessness with patient information, such as sending an email with such content via an unreliable account or to the wrong patient with the same or similar name, as well as leaving a logged-on computer unsupervised.
Focus Groups
Privileged Users
These individuals generally enjoy an organization’s utmost trust; however, this also leaves them with the most opportunities to do harm, both intentionally and unintentionally.
Terminated Employees
Employees may decide to take data with them when they are terminated. If there are not clear policies regarding termination procedures in place, they may still be able to access systems after termination, which is a security risk.
Third Parties
Employees who work remotely, subcontractors, and some vendors may have access to patient data. Organizations often have less ability to oversee these individuals, and most frequently do not have a close relationship with them. In addition, these individuals do not always go through the organization’s training program.
How much could HIPAA cost?
Anthem, Inc. has agreed to pay $16 million to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and take substantial corrective action to settle potential violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy and Security Rules after a series of cyberattacks led to the largest health data breach in history and exposed the electronic protected health information of almost 79 million people.
Even if your data breach is not publicly used and doesn’t hurt your business directly, doesn’t mean that HIPAA will not com back to you.
HIPAA
How to fight back against insider threats and compliance with Empulse?
EHR and PHI policies
While multitasking, which is something that healthcare insurance agents do a lot of, it is fairly easy to make a mistake. Our solution ensures that your employees process EHR (Electronic Healthcare Records) and PHI (Protected Health Information) documents in the proper and secure way - where you allow them to.
Passwordless Login (Beta)
While the cloud solution facilitated the use of software in general, it also created a large security gap. Allowing employees to login from personal devices may lead to intentionally or unintentionally HIPAA violation. Our passwordless login system allows your employees to seamlessly connect to your preferable cloud platforms only from the devices you approved.
Furthermore, the fact that your employees are not aware of passwords represents excellent protection against the phishing.
Data Loss Prevention(DLP)
Exfiltration of a significant amount of data most commonly occurs with disgruntled employees, employees that are moving to a new company or those that are starting their own business. Why would they choose to start from scratch when they could start with an entire initial database? We can detect such actions and prevent them.
IT Forensics
Once an incident happens, you can easily access the actions that preceded it in order to understand how and why it happened. Understanding the context of an incident is as important as prevention itself, since it allows you to make the necessary changes and keep it from happening again.
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