cyberattacks

Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery. He underwent the procedure not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, rather, for a reason he doesn’t usually talk much about: he hopes that it will improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made. “If the world ends—and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble—getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass,” he told me recently...

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Data stolen from a bank quickly becomes useless once the breach is discovered and passcodes are changed. But data from the healthcare industry, which includes both personal identities and medical histories, can live a lifetime. Cyberattacks will cost hospitals more than $305 billion over the next five years and one in 13 patients will have their data compromised by a hack, according to industry consultancy Accenture. And a study by the Brookings Institution predicts that one in four data breaches this year will hit the healthcare industry...

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Global information services company Experian has released its 2017 data breach industry forecast, and the news is sobering. Among the report's top five predictions? "Healthcare organizations will be the most targeted sector, with new sophisticated attacks emerging." Experian sees healthcare as particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks because medical identity theft remains so lucrative and relatively easy for hackers to exploit – and they continue to find markets for reselling patient data...

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...Officials have warned for years that a sophisticated cyberattack could cripple critical infrastructure or allow thieves to make off with the financial information of millions of Americans. President Obama pushed Congress to enact cybersecurity legislation, and when it didn’t, he issued his own executive order in 2013...

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Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should — in most circumstances — reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday.  But Mr. Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear national security or law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that is likely to allow the N.S.A. to continue to exploit security flaws both to crack encryption on the Internet and to design cyberweapons.

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Ever-increasing cyberattacks on the US public healthcare sector will place material revenue and expense pressures on not-for-profit (NFP) hospitals and health systems, Fitch Ratings says. The healthcare sector has seen a historic increase in the number and severity of cyber assaults over the past 18 months. The sector is viewed as a target-rich environment due to the large amount of sensitive data that healthcare entities maintain for patient care and operations.

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