Hospitals More Vulnerable to Botnets, Spam, and Malware than Fortune 1000 Firms
HIPAA Journal
Steve Alder
A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) sought to identify the relationship between cybersecurity risk ratings and healthcare data breaches.
The study was conducted using data obtained from the Department of Health and Human Services between 2014-2019 and hospital cybersecurity ratings obtained from BitSight. The data sample included 3,528 hospital-year observations and Fortune 1000 firms were used as the benchmark against which hospital cybersecurity ratings were compared.
For many years, healthcare has lagged other industries when it comes to managing and reducing cybersecurity risk. The researchers found that in aggregate, hospitals had significantly lower cybersecurity ratings than the Fortune 1000 firms; however, the situation has been improving and, based on BitSight risk ratings, the healthcare industry has now ...