Measuring Healthcare Data Breaches

Abstract

Over the past few years, healthcare data breaches have grown rapidly. Moreover, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the level of exposure to security threats increased as the frequency of patient visits to hospitals has also increased. During the COVID-19 crisis, circumstances and constraints such as curfew imposed on the public have resulted in a noticeable increase in Internet usage for healthcare services, employing intelligent devices such as smartphones. The Healthcare sector is being targeted by criminals internally and externally; healthcare data breaches impact hospitals and patients alike. To examine issues and discover insights, a comprehensive study of health data breaches is necessary. To this end, this paper investigates healthcare data breach incidents by conducting measurements and analysis recognizing different viewpoints, including temporal analysis, attack discovery, security attributes of the breached data, attack actors, and threat actions. Based on the analysis, we found the number of attacks is decreasing, although not precluding an increasing severity, the time of attack discovery is long across all targets, breached data does not employ basic security functions, threat actions are attributed to various vectors, e.g., malware, hacking, and misuse, and could be caused by internal actors. Our study provides a cautionary tale of medical security in light of confirmed incidents through measurements.