The healthcare industry suffers some of the highest volumes of cyberattacks and there are whispers of a lot more to come. Combine this trend with breach damage costs surpassing all other industries and you get the thunderous warning of a devastating cyberattack storm approaching the sector. To help healthcare entities strengthen their cyber resilience, we’ve compiled a list of some of the biggest data breaches in the healthcare industry, ordered by degree of impact.

Digital transformation puts all industries at greater risk of cyber attacks, and the healthcare industry is no exception. As US healthcare organizations increase their reliance on health information technology for purposes such as data sharing, process automation, and system interoperability, their attack surface expands rapidly. This rapidly multiplying number of attack vectors increases cybersecurity risk considerably.

Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) considers the full context of a cyber threat to inform the design of highly-targeted defensive actions. CTI combines multiple factors, including the motivations of cybercriminals and Indicators of Compromise (IOC), to help security teams understand and prepare for the challenges of an anticipated cyber threat.

Simply put, a data leak is when sensitive data is unknowingly exposed to the public, and a data breach is an event caused by a cyberattack. An example of a data leak is a software misconfiguration facilitating unauthorized access to sensitive resources - such as the major Microsoft Power Apps data leak in 2021. An example of a data breach is a cybercriminal overcoming network security controls to gain access to sensitive resources.

Kerberos authentication is a network protocol that secures user access to services/applications by using secret-key cryptography across client-server communications. The Kerberos network authentication protocol helps prevent hackers from intercepting passwords over unsecured networks.

A data exfiltration attack involves the unauthorized transfer of sensitive data, such as personal data and intellectual property, out of a target system and into a separate location. These transfers could either occur internally, through insider threats, or externally, through remote Command and Control servers. Every cyberattack with a data theft objective could be classified as a data exfiltration attack.

The combination of poor cybersecurity practices, sensitive data storage, and a desperation to preserve business continuity at all costs, makes the healthcare industry a prime target for cybercriminals - an inevitability that was further exacerbated by the pandemic. To support the relevance of healthcare cybersecurity programs within the current cyberattack climate, the 4 biggest cybersecurity challenges in the healthcare industry are listed below.