Healthcare Cybersecurity Threat Context and Mitigation Opportunities

Abstract

With the rapid increase in cybersecurity incidents around the globe, no business or industry is hidden from cybercriminals' crosshairs. Cyber-attacks are evolving and becoming more complex each day, causing much damage to different financial and reputational sectors. The health sector (including healthcare technology) is increasingly digitized and continues to offer life-critical services. It continues to improve diagnosis, treatment, and patient care with state-of-the-art technologies. However, cybercriminals continue to exploit vulnerabilities and exfiltrate confidential patient data and other confidential information. The health care sector offers cybercriminals a rich source of confidential data and is very easy to exploit as the defense and security controls are weak. Because of the growing number of threats associated with the health sector, it is essential to understand how health care practitioners - along with concerned critical Information Technology (IT) teams - can take steps to improve the cybersecurity posture of this industry and help reduce the attack surface. Hence, this paper discusses a critical approach to analyze the current cybersecurity challenges faced by the health care sector and relevant mitigation and other scholarly articles and research papers.