Extreme heat, cyberattacks impact blood supply
Editor's Note The Red Cross is reporting a 25-percent drop in its national blood inventory due to hot weather a month after the American Hospital Association (AHA) warned about the impact of cyberattacks on critical supplies at hospitals. According to an August 6 report in The Hill, heat-related challenges have…
Healthcare pays dearly for data breaches
Editor's Note Responding to and recovering from data breaches in healthcare is more expensive than any other industry, according to a report by IBM and the Ponemon Institute. Healthcare Dive reported on the results August 1. According to that article, the $9.8 million average cost for a breach this year…
Health systems learn lessons from CrowdStrike global IT outage
Editor's Note Hospitals and health systems have largely returned to normal operations in the wake of a global IT outage caused by a faulty update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, according to a July 29 article in Becker’s Health IT. The outage, which began July 18, resulted in many health systems'…
North Korean hackers extort hospitals to fund attacks on US government
Editor's Note North Korean hackers targeted U.S. hospitals and healthcare systems with ransomware to fund a covert information exfiltration campaign against American military and scientific entities, according to a July 25 report from CBS News. The first attack was a May 2021 ransomware infiltration of a hospital in Kansas. The…
Mass Brigham cancels surgeries amid worldwide tech outage
Editor's Note A global Microsoft server outage disrupting critical services from airline operations to banking is also having a significant impact on healthcare, according to multiple news reports. On example is a Friday, July 19 report from CBS News reporting that Mass General Brigham, the largest health care system in…
Bipartisan healthcare cybersecurity bill introduced
Editor's Note Introduced by a bipartisan group of Senators, the Healthcare Cybersecurity Act aims to bolster the cyber-defenses of healthcare entities through the collaboration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). According to a July 16 report in HealthExec,…
Healthcare industry groups criticize federal cybersecurity reporting rule
Editor's Note Healthcare industry groups are calling for the federal government to streamline and ease the recently proposed cybersecurity incident reporting rule by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Fierce Healthcare reported July 8. According to the report, CISA's proposal imposes enhanced reporting requirements for critical infrastructure entities, including…
Justice Department announces nationwide action on healthcare fraud enforcement
Editor's Note On June 27, The Justice Department announced the 2024 National Health Care Fraud Enforcement Action, leading to criminal charges against 193 defendants, including 76 medical professionals across 32 federal districts in the U.S. for their involvement in various health care fraud schemes. These schemes accounted for approximately $2.75…
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Healthcare cybersecurity earns B+, but vulnerabilities remain
Editor's Note Although SecurityScorecard gave the US healthcare a “better than expected” B+ rating for cybersecurity in 2024, the supply chain cybersecurity firm also highlighted significant risks in application and endpoint security, HealthcareIT News reported June 25. Overall, 35% of third-party data breaches in 2023 affected healthcare organizations, the…