Health Care Industry Now One of the Most Vulnerable to Hackers

Too many "gaping security holes"

In recent years, the health care industry has increasingly used the internet in search of efficient and improved methods, and has thus subsequently exposed a wide array of hospital computers and medical devices to hackers. A year-long examination of cybersecurity has found that health care is among the most vulnerable industries in the country, in part because it lags behind in addressing known problems. Security researchers warn that intruders could exploit known gaps to steal patients’ records for use in identity theft, and even launch disruptive attacks that could shut down critical hospital systems. They are beginning to find the same kinds of trivial-seeming flaws that opened the way for hackers to penetrate the Pentagon systems, and computers at firms such as Google. “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,” said Avi Rubin, a computer scientist and technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University. (Washington Post)

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