Health Care: The Sector That Is Most Vulnerable to Hackers

A recent study performed by The Washington Post has found that health care is the sector that's most vulnerable to cyberattacks.

Over the past years, the health care industry has started relying more and more or Internet-enabled devices to improve the services it offers. However, when the new technology was implemented, no one bothered to make sure that it was properly secured against cyberattacks.

“I have never seen an industry with more gaping security holes. If our financial industry regarded security the way the health-care sector does, I would stuff my cash in a mattress under my bed,” Avi Rubin, the technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, explained.

Critical hospital systems can be disrupted by cybercriminals, and fraudsters can easily gain access to patient records and use the information contained in them for identity theft schemes.

While some experts say that the industry is taking steps to remediate these issues, others argue that it still has a long way to go, considering that basic security holes are identified all the time.

The main concern in all this is that cybercriminals have not yet begun to exploit the existing security holes, but that day might come sooner than we think.