Email Credentials Risky for Healthcare Hacking
Despite a growing awareness among healthcare risk managers of the vulnerability of their computer systems, hackers still get in. Often, they break in through the organization’s weakest link: end-user email credentials.
Research released recently by Evolve IP, The Cloud Services Company, located in Wayne, PA, included an analysis of 1,000 healthcare organizations and illustrates the need for proactive threat monitoring coupled with near real-time disaster recovery solutions, the company says. Employee email represents one of the greatest risks, the analysis suggests.
The research determined that 68% of the healthcare organizations analyzed have compromised email credentials and nearly 80% of compromised data include actionable password information, simplifying hackers’ efforts to infiltrate the network.
An estimated 7,500 individual incidents occurred across the study where healthcare companies had email credentials compromised due to phishing or key logging attacks. Any one of these vulnerabilities could rapidly escalate to ransomware, denial of service attacks, or data breaches across an entire enterprise, the company says.
Nearly one-quarter of the stolen passwords were available for sale or trade on the dark web as unencrypted, clearly visible text, the company says. The rest of the passwords were encrypted, but the company says the level of encryption used presents no real hurdle to professional hackers that want to crack them.
The full report is available online at: http://bit.ly/2nxofIT.
Despite a growing awareness among healthcare risk managers of the vulnerability of their computer systems, hackers still get in. Often, they break in through the organization’s weakest link: end-user email credentials.
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