Data breaches are becoming commonplace in the healthcare industry, and efforts to prevent hackers from accessing that data should be at the forefront of any organizations.
For example, the Athens Orthopedic Clinic was hacked by a group of hackers known as The Dark Overlord, and more than 200,000 of the clinic's current and former patients had their data taken in June. It was recently reported in the Athens Banner-Herald that neither the FBI or the clinic had information to offer.
As a result of that attack, the clinic has had to hire a separate public relations person to handle calls related to it, and may be victim to two class-action lawsuits.
Here's what you should know.
1. According to the Bitglass 2016 Healthcare Breach Report, nearly one in three Americans were the victim of a healthcare data breach in 2015, HIT Consultant reports.
2. The healthcare industry was the victim of 56 hacks so far in 2016, up from 31 in 2015.
3. In 2015, 98 percent of the attacks were from hackers targeting the healthcare industry.
"These high-profile attacks were the largest source of healthcare data loss and indicate that cyber attackers are increasingly targeting medical data," HIT Consultant reports
4. InformationWeek reports, that the average data hack costs a healthcare organization $2.2 million, with $6.2 billion in total losses, industry wide in the past two years.
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