Healthcare leads in cost of data breaches

“The size of an industry network has an impact on the scoring. The larger the network, the more digital assets are available, increasing the vectors of potential exploitation,” SecurityScorecard chief research officer Alex Heid told SC Media UK.

 

According to the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), USA, there were 363 cases of data breaches globally in medical and healthcare organisations in 2018, exposing 9,927,798 documents. These numbers are set to increase globally, according to the SecurityScorecard research.

 

Last year, the health records of more than 1.5 million people in Singapore — including the country’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong — were stolen in a cyber-attack that targeted the government’s health database.

 

Lack of security in the sector has resulted in a 50 percent increase of data breaches, from June 2017 to May 2019. In the US, breaches on organisations affecting more than 500 individuals have crossed 30 per month in 2019, said the research report.

 

Data breaches in healthcare sector costs US$ 6.45 million (£5.2 million) on average, almost double that of the global average of US$ 3.92 million (£3.2 million), according to an IBM report. Healthcare is the most breached industry, confirms research by SecurityScorecard.