A new report from IDC Health Insights claims that healthcare security needs investment to ensure protection from an increasing threat of cyber attacks, according to the Computing website.
From the 2014 ICE Insights Cross Industry Cyber Theft Survey, in a section dealing with 'Cyber Threats and Attacks Against Healthcare Organizations', the group discovered that 39.4 percent of American healthcare organizations had been hit by more than 10 cyber attacks in the last year, with nearly a third (27.1 percent) of these marked as "successful".
The report stated that a quarter of these cyber attacks had an impact upon everyday business operations, with impact times ranging from less than an hour all the way up to 24 hours.
"Healthcare organizations will need to invest in threat intelligence reporting, which combines reports from security vendors and the organization's own network logs," an IDC spokesperson said.
Computing states that the company believe this should take the form of "predictive analytics" which "can then be applied against these external and internal data feeds to help identify behaviors that suggest systems are being compromised and under attack."
The VP of research for IDC Health Insights, Lynne Dunbrack was unequivocal in how serious she views the findings as being: "For healthcare organizations, it's not a matter of if they are going to be attacked but when. Healthcare cyber security strategies need to take a comprehensive approach and include not only react and defend capabilities, but also predict and prevent capabilities to effectively thwart cyber criminals."
There was a silver lining in the survey, however, as Fierce Health IT reports that 59.6 percent of healthcare industry respondents had increased their spending on cyber security in the last three years, with just 38.3 percent stating their healthcare security spending had remained static.
