SecurityScorecard, a leader in security ratings, recently released a new report titled, “SecurityScorecard 2018 Healthcare Report: A Pulse on The Healthcare Industry’s Cybersecurity Risks,” which pulls data from more than 1200 healthcare companies.
The research team analyzed information such as issue severity, industry-defined risk level, corporate peer performance, and more. The team’s analysis revealed insights on how the healthcare industry performs compared to others, and specific areas of cybersecurity weakness within healthcare organizations.
“Last year took a toll on the overall cybersecurity confidence in healthcare organizations, with dozens of ransomware attacks, and data breaches. It’s no surprise that our research team found healthcare organizations are behind in proper network and endpoint security protocols,” said Jasson Casey, CTO, SecurityScorecard. “As we move through 2018, healthcare organizations need to get back to the fundamentals of good cybersecurity hygiene by keeping up with patching schedules and outfitting the organization with enough personnel to accomplish this goal.”
Key Insights:
- The healthcare industry ranks 15th when compared to 17 other major U.S. industries.
- The healthcare industry is one of the lowest performing industries in terms of endpoint security, posing a threat to patient data and potentially patient lives.
- Social engineering attacks continue to put patient data at risk.
- 60 percent of the most common cybersecurity issues in the healthcare industry relate to poor patching cadence.
- All healthcare organizations struggled with patching cadence and network security.
Slow patching cadences indicate several factors are affecting IT departments. Sometimes companies lack engineering resources to implement a solution while other times they lack resources to respond to problems patches cause. In more concerning cases, some companies do not know vulnerabilities and patches exist. Since many standards and regulations require ongoing monitoring, this last reason for slow patching cadence risks the organization’s data and its compliance stance.
The sheer number of ongoing software patches often paralyzes organizations, keeping them from implementing the most critical repairs and updates. This opens breached companies to negligence claims and lawsuits. With so many vulnerabilities and security concerns, risk assessments that catalogue critical assets and focus on continuous monitoring for critical vulnerabilities act as the road map to cybersecurity success.
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