2020 Saw Major Increase in Healthcare Hacking Incidents and Insider Breaches
HIPAA Journal
Steve Alder
2021 was a challenging year for healthcare organizations. Not only was the industry on the frontline in the fight against COVID-19, hackers who took advantage of overrun hospitals to steal data and conduct ransomware attacks.
The 2021 Breach Barometer Report from Protenus shows the extent to which the healthcare industry suffered from cyberattacks and other breaches in 2020. The report is based on 758 healthcare data breaches that were reported to the HHS’ Office for Civil Rights or announced via the media and other sources in 2020, with the data for the report provided by databreaches.net.
The number of data breaches has continued to rise every year since 2016 when Protenus started publishing its annual healthcare breach report. 2020 saw the largest annual increase in breaches with 30% more breaches occurring than 2019. Data was obtained on 609 of those incidents, across which 40,735,428 patient and health plan members were affected. 2020 was the second consecutive year that saw more than 40 million healthcare records exposed or compromised.
Healthcare Hacking Incidents Increased by...