Cyber Security And Cyber Threats Essay

An advancement towards adopting a system that allows all aspects of information security to be protected is highly encouraged. The implementation of this new system will ensure all information and data, while it’s in storage, will be protected and kept confidential. This will help also improve the accessibility of the structure on which the information security management system is built on. EHR cybersecurity should develop different strategic and process methods for technology to mitigate cyber threats. HCO’s should only implement a security program that’s simple and easy for users to practice yet is an effective system. This will significantly ensure the ability to monitor and detect threats in real time. Within the components of this new cyber security system, healthcare organizations should address complex security problems by identifying and simplifying, the right tools, laws, policies. Hence, the management of healthcare is at greater risk than ever before since hackers and there are overwhelming costs associated data breaches. In the end, cyber security threats will always be present, but what’s important is to limit the threats to a minimum by advancing the implementation of IT

Cyber security threats change quickly as Internet increases, and also the related dangers are getting to be progressively international. Being covered against cyber security threats requires almost all end users, actually the most complex versions, to know the particular threats in addition to enhance their particular safety measures with a continuing foundation. On April 28, 2014 President Obama has declared that the “cyber threat is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation” and that “America 's economic prosperity in the 21st century will depend on cyber security.” The internet enables and also helps people in a many ways and a example is collect, store, process huge amounts of data, which includes vulnerable data of small business, transactional and personal. Everything in this world is based on internet now a days.

Hospital and health facility administrators face hardened criminals who hack medical records with ever-increasing sophistication. Hackers gain access to critical information, such as medical claims, financial data, Social Security numbers and credit card data that enable identity theft, credit card fraud and other privacy breaches. One of the major security failures in the news was the CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield attack that exposed 1.1 million of its members to thefts of their personal information.[1] Combined with high-profile breaches at Anthem and Premera Blue Cross, the breach illustrates the changing role of medical administrators

As Health information system continues to evolve and innovate the healthcare industries, one should be conscious of information security and safety. Kaiser Permanente experiences this dilemma first hand. On August 2000, Kaiser Permanente had a serious security breach that sends out email messages to their patients with another patient’s information. This integrated health delivery system serves over eight million members with appointments, prescription refills, health information, clinical advice and patient forums was breath and nineteen of the member received email messages with private information.

Cyber security, also referred to as information technology security, focuses on protecting computers, networks, software programs and data from unintended or unauthorized access, change or destruction. Post 9/11 and other terrorist attacks, the United States grows its endeavors to repulse cyberattacks, U.S. corporate organizations and the government agencies wind up in strife over how to adjust to new methods of security and privacy. The current state of security measure protocols and privacy policies placed by the US government in cyberspace raises concerns for the 99%. This is due to the recent cyber-attacks on American corporate organization systems and government alike, where their digital information and network infrastructures within the systems were compromised, and personal data was hacked and stolen.

In today’s cyber environment everything is that the tip of society’s fingertip and healthcare is not the exception. Every organization from hospitals to the local family doctor’s office is realizing the cost savings and convenience of having a medical system in place that can store, track, audit, and maintain a patient’s history. Such technology is mutually beneficial to patients alike since searching for providers becomes much easier when login into a medical portal allows the user to find specialist of all sorts without much hassle.

This paper will discuss the various threats and vulnerabilities related to the United States healthcare system as well as government regulations and policies as well as the issues of overall personal data security as a whole. Threat assessment in regards to a cyber- attack and the level of liability in the aftermath of a cyber-attack will also be discussed. In addition to the implementation of future protocols regarding personal identifiable information to reduce the sheer number of vulnerabilities, prevent data theft as a result of future attempts at cyber-attacks.

While this new era of healthcare has its benefits, it also comes with its own set of unique challenges. The security of the very devices that were created to help doctors and patients are giving hackers the opportunity to steal sensitive health and financial information.

The safeguard of patient health information and consumer information is effectively and sufficiently guarded is the upmost importance to any organization. Information security is important because it the law. Any deficiency of an effective information security program can be costly to an organization and be detrimental to patients and consumers. Organizations must be aware of the growing opportunities for breaches in security as technology is advancing is making the collection, maintenance, and dissemination of protected health information easier (Sayles, 2013). The following two security breaches will identify threats, and provide a security plan for the organization.

Event- 2. Though nothing is full proof in the current world of Internet and cyber attacks, proper planning and investment can prevent data theft to some extent. Health care organization can improve their heath data security status by investing in their incident response approaches, which will include documenting a formalized response process, and by building an incident response team to deal with it. Keeping relationship with outside experts to prevent hacking of data is helpful. Having all experts from all fields like IT personnel, security gurus, and operational people is not important, rather having a multi-dimensional and multi-disciplinary team who will understand the process is better to prevent security threats (Moore, 2014). Measures such as two-fold sign-in passwords/Captcha could have been implemented by Anthem. There should have been proper cyber security protocols instead of having a lax protocol, which made the hacker a way to invade into the

The potential vulnerabilities within a Health Delivery Organizations (HDOs) are numerous. The impact of exploitation of the can be enormous. It’s not only that the information will be damaged, stolen, or misused; the actual or implied theft of improperly protected electronic data can result in extortion threats. The cost and distraction of a hacker’s extortion demand that threatens to shut down an entity’s system or to expose confidential information can be significant. In addition to the direct costs related to the extortion demand, a facility can have major expenses, including those for the required notification of patients related to the real or threatened release of their identity information. Many states require companies to notify all of their customers if a breach is even suspected. The potential for exploitation does not stop there. Consider any of the following scenarios, note that some do not even require access to personal information, a hacker just needs to get access:

According to the 2015 KPMG Healthcare Cybersecurity Survey, 81% of healthcare executives report that their “organizations have been compromised by malware, botnets or cyber attacks at least once in the past two years.”

Information security so important in healthcare because being able to share data digitally holds a lot of potential for doctors, nurses and clinicians to send and receive content fast and effectively. Although this is a great thing, on one hand, it is also dangerous because patient data and other sensitive information are even more at risk of being stolen, exposed or accessed by unauthorized parties. Because of this, security must be a top priority for any medical organization today and for the future. In order to ensure patient data will be secure, healthcare facilities should implement safeguards on data information.

In today’s society, medical records becomes a huge issue. In many organizations such as healthcare, patient confidentiality becomes a high concern. Having internet health services, creates a challenge for compliance in healthcare. Providers have treated application security and infrastructure security independently until now. Access must be secured for clinical applications to alleviate the concern from providers in healthcare. Therefore, IT infrastructure must be protected from hackers, misusing information as well as thieves. (FairWarning, n.d.)

Information security and privacy is occupying a most important role in the healthcare territory in order to deliver protected information process to their patients (Appari, & Johnson, 2010). As healthcare department is the organization with vast data and essential information the hospitals has to keep a useful information security technique in their enterprise process (Mishra et al., 2011). Information security is one such phase in the healthcare sphere which is extremely problematic to describe and evaluate even to the individuals who are working on the process. In the healthcare organization, information is of many types which required for the work and even the security is a main control for almost all the practices which are transmitted out in the healthcare field (Appari, & Johnson, 2010). Hospitals, in specific, have been instructed to create a new set of security specialists to protect healthcare data tools techniques upon which exists may rely. Healthcare data is very critical for patients because it is very confidential records. If a medical apparatus is filled with a computer virus it can even exemplify a possibility to patients ' lives. Hence, hospitals should design alertness of the risk, to defend against concerns to healthcare databanks and be concerned about the high risk of infected computers or medical tools being connected to their networks (Mishra et al., 2011).