Cyber attacks are on the rise – think of them as an ‘act of war’, healthcare executives warn
The Changing healthcare cyberattacks that disrupted the nation’s health care system earlier this year—affecting one-third of Americans at a total cost of $100 million—was a major wake-up call: Such attacks in the health care industry Healthcare is on the rise. And they should be treated with the utmost seriousness, a council at Luck‘S Health brainstorming conference in Dana Point, California, on Monday.
“In my world, it’s almost an act of war,” said Stephen Gillett, President and CEO of Indeed, a life sciences company. “That’s the level of invasion on infrastructure. It’s people’s lives, their personal information. It’s not a technology problem we’re solving.”
He believes that this act of aggression requires a response akin to what would happen if another country sank an American ship off their coast.
“It must be taken with the same seriousness and go beyond a technical response,” he said. Especially because “the money these bad guys make from these [cybercrime] exploits now surpass all the world’s illegal drug trade combined,” he said.
In the case of Change, it was a Russian organization that exploited very simple configuration issues with multi-factor authentication—which will determine how companies prepare themselves to respond to attacks going forward, noted the panel’s experts, including Andrea Downing, chair and fellow. founder of light collective and Bob Segert, president and CEO of Athena Health.
“Security used to be [thought of] make circumference: Calculate this circumference. And protect the bad guys coming into the perimeter,” Gillett said. But that is an outdated mindset.
“The bad guys are already on the perimeter. How do you protect data, information, and intellectual property that’s critical to your business, critical to your infrastructure, even critical to your government? he say,. “To do this, it’s not just about buying some spectacular technology that you deploy and everything becomes a safe rainbows and butterflies scenario. That’s not how it works.”
Instead, “You have to really bring the human component together,” he said. “So it’s not just your security team that’s worried about this. It’s all about the company. There needs to be a culture of security and privacy, especially in healthcare.”
That’s especially true given the sophistication of recent attacks — including an effort believed to involve the Dalai Lama, who has according to the report was scheduled to receive radiation for prostate cancer several years ago at Mayo Clinic. A hostile nation “managed to hack into the radiation system so that when the Dalai Lama came for treatment, they would deliver a lethal dose of radiation,” Gillett said.
It was stopped and he received treatment. “But did that happen? You will only read that the Dalai Lama passed away due to exposure and you will never know the sophistication of the attack,” he said. “And when you start hearing these asymmetrical stories, that’s why the term war comes to mind. Because we have to respond to this problem almost like a NATO for security and have all these organizations around the world working together to solve this problem. No one country, no one city and certainly no one industry can solve this problem on its own.”
