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.
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.
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.
Picture this. You’re an administrator in charge of providing basic amenities and day-to-day needs across 1,000 beds in an urban multispecialty hospital. One fine morning, you notice that all the patients’ bedside monitoring systems (the computer-like devices that display patient vitals like heartbeat and blood pressure) have stopped functioning, leaving doctors and nurses in the dark.
In the latter part of December 2021, WhiteSource Diffend detected the new release of a package called @maui-mf/app-auth. This package used a vector of attack that was similar to the server side request forgery (SSRF) attack against Capital One in 2019, in which a server was tricked into executing commands on behalf of a remote user, thereby enabling the user to treat the server as a proxy for requests and gain access to non-public endpoints.
Tsippi Dach explores some notable breaches caused by mis configuration s and how organizations can avoid becoming the next big headline.
