Patient Data is valuable and vulnerable – the healthcare industry must prepare or risk catastrophic breaches

Gone are the days of wearing wristwatches to merely tell the time. Smart connected devices have made a huge public impact and people are widely accepting them as a part of life. Smartphones and MP3s led the charge against analog timekeeping devices, but now smart wearables have stolen a significant market share from the humble wristwatch.

With new technology comes new risk—particularly the manipulation or theft of personal data. The healthcare industry must look to credible threat detectors such as Infocyte Hunt to secure their devices.

Smartwatches’  biggest appeal could be their biggest flaw: monitoring the user’s health and fitness. In doing this, the device produces large quantities of personal data that is highly desirable to cybercriminals. If healthcare professionals hope to use this data for good, they must ensure its safety and security. Compromised or stolen data could prove incredibly costly and embarrassing in addition to having implications for patient health and care.

Smart wearables are recording health data; healthcare providers need to increase their security or risk exposing patient information

Wearables are here to stay. An estimated 16% of US adults own a smart wearable device, up from 12% in 2017. Increasingly, the healthcare views wearables as a route to vital patient data—but as with every digital innovation, cybercriminals are lurking around the corner, which healthcare executives need to hold at the forefront of any new wearable innovation.

The rapid growth in wearables monitoring health data is of serious concern; if that data were haphazardly stored, it could be stolen by a malicious third party and sold to dishonest organizations that want to use that data to assess users’ health risks. This could, in turn, lead to crippling increases in health insurance premiums or policy cancellation.

This risk is credible enough for organizations to be taking out data breach insurance with companies such as Hiscox to protect themselves from customer data theft. Conan Dooley, Manager of Privacy Engineering at Google, supports these concerns.

The health industry accounted for a quarter of data breaches in 2018!

In 2018, 2,216 data breaches occurred across nine industries: accommodation, education, financial, healthcare, information, manufacturing, professional, public, and retail. Of these, the health industry accounted for a quarter of the incidents. A notable target was Fitbit in 2016, which suffered from the loss of a select number of account passwords. Another notable cybercrime victim was Under Armour’s tool MyFitnessPal, which admitted that a possible 150 million users’ passwords, usernames, and email addresses had been captured by cybercriminals. Fitness tracker organizations are attractive targets, they have started to be targeted for their client data such as passwords and emails, but it won’t be long until more critical health data is soon exploited.

There is a bigger risk than simply data loss: data manipulation

The loss of data from any organization is embarrassing and can cause significant media attention. Although, there is a greater risk, and that’s data manipulation.

The manipulation of data has been a concern for a few years now. In 2015, James Clapper, the United States director of national intelligence, supported by Michael Rogers, the National Security Agency director, warned the United States Congress that the next big cybersecurity concern of online data theft would most probably involve the manipulation of information.

Todd Feinman, the founder of Spirion, delves into how this affects the health industry and highlights that an attacker could manipulate patient data. Depending on the data manipulated, this could result in incorrect dosages or the misdiagnosing of a serious health issue. This could, of course, lead to reputational damage, financial loss, or even the loss of life.

Don’t panic! Smart wearables are vital to improving healthcare; just be sure to protect the data they hold!

So yes, fitness trackers and wearables are being targeted—they monitor huge amounts of personal data, but they are a vital tool that can make a huge difference. Smart wearables can provide a constant health report and help users monitor their wellbeing. The big data that wearables generate will feed AI and advanced analytics algorithms for the improvement of end-to-end healthcare.

In the words of cardiologist Dr. Eric Topol, “We’re getting data that we’ve never had before… It’s quite extraordinary.”

To keep generating this all-important data, it will be necessary for the health industry to invest in credible cybersecurity defense. One such product that can safely secure IOT devices is Infocyte Hunt. Infocyte Hunt is an automated threat-hunting product that searches the endpoints and servers in a network, whether they are on-premise or in the cloud, making it perfect for securing remote devices. Infocyte Hunt conducts a forensic-like inspection to identify any compromised device or group of devices, aiding in the defense of user data. 

The Bottom Line: Smart wearable devices are on the up; the healthcare industry needs to ensure they are working with the most secure devices!

Ultimately, personal data is always going to be a target, and cybercriminals are going to try their hardest to get their hands on it. The healthcare industry needs to ensure they employ the most secure devices on the market. Moreover, users must be educated on how to operate such devices safely and what risks are attached to their employment. Basic education, such as employing strong passwords, is a critical defense that many people neglect. This education must be the responsibility of device manufacturers and enterprise that looks to use the technology.

Evidence suggests that it’s predominantly the younger generation taking up the smart wearable technology trend and that they’re generally savvy when it comes to security. Although, as the technology becomes more widespread throughout different generations, the importance of device security and safe operation education will need to be pushed by the healthcare industry and manufacturers. The healthcare industry must make sure that it maintains a strong cybersecurity defense, and it should turn to experienced partners and providers to keep ahead of cybercriminals. Employing credible security products such as Infocyte Hunt will be critical as wearable technology develops in the healthcare industry.