What can we expect for 2018 in the realm of health data security? If you guessed more hacks, you're on the right track.
Privacy expert Rebecca Herold, CEO of The Privacy Professor and President of SIMBUS LLC, provides her always insightful perspective.
So, what can we expect next year? Here are the 11 most significant healthcare information security and privacy events that I predict will occur throughout 2018.
1. Increased occurrences of ransomware and associated ransom costs: Too many organizations pay the ransoms because they lack up-to-date backups, and then the crooks target them again. Every type of business, even the sole-proprietor business, is a target. All organizations need to implement prevention protections and be prepared to respond to ransomware.
2. Increased distributed denial-of-service attacks: DDoS attacks will be more prevalent and more harmful. They will increasingly use "smart" medical devices and other types of internet of things devices. The Mirai and Reaper DDoS botnets demonstrated how the IOT devices are used to support large, extended DDoS attacks by exploiting vulnerabilities in wireless routers, IOT devices with insufficient security controls, default credentials or no credentials. The next DDoS attack will impact larger numbers of devices, exploiting more vulnerabilities, within far more locations, including legacy systems.