TechCrunch broke news of research last Friday that A billion medical images are exposed online, as doctors ignore warnings. Discovered by German cybersecurity firm Greenbone Networks, the exposure follows a similar report from the company in September that detailed 24 million medical records on 590 online medical image archive systems. Two months later, the firm detailed the number of exposed servers had increased by more than half, to 35 million patient exams, exposing 1.19 billion scans and representing a considerable violation of patient privacy. Researchers pointed to a decades-old Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) and DICOM, a file format industry standard.
Experts Comments
January 14, 2020
What we are seeing here is a breakdown between the desire for privacy and the ease of access to the data. On one hand, there is a push to make medical information more easily available between providers, on the other is a failure to secure this information.
While we can expect doctors and nurses to be excellent caregivers, we cannot always expect them to be experts in securing customer information such as this. The platforms being used must do a better job of preventing this sort of disclosure .....Read More
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January 14, 2020
Unfortunately most of the medical world thinks it exists in isolation, in its own private cloud, which is clearly unrealistic. It often appears that most medical professionals don’t understand that so much information is globally accessible.
Often, security compliance is managed as a subset of medical compliance, and therefore cybersecurity take a back seat.
Insecurity is compounded by the highly fragmented and outsourced nature of the US healthcare landscape. The need for multiple.....Read More
January 14, 2020
This astonishing disclosure shows how toothless the United States HIPAA regulations are, and how lax healthcare providers have become when storing patient data. This should serve as a wake-up call for providers to take a fresh look at how they process, maintain, and safeguard patient-identifiable photos.
January 14, 2020
Generally speaking, in this kind of situation, it’s the configuration of the network which is at fault before anything else. No system handling sensitive data should be accessible from the internet without the need for a VPN or some strong authentication method. The DICOM protocol itself was developed a long time ago and did not take into consideration the implications of cybersecurity.
It is often the case when legacy applications are moved from fortified data centers into cloud.....Read More
January 14, 2020
The massive amount of data sets combined with the number of freely accessible PACS systems that were configured in similar ways shows that protecting data still is a major challenge for organizations in all verticals. While it is not always possible to prevent malicious access, sophisticated data protection is a must when processing and storing sensitive information – especially PII and healthcare records. These are core requirements of data privacy regulations like HIPAA and GDPR, and there.....Read More
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@James McQuiggan, Security Awareness Advocate, provides expert commentary at @Information Security Buzz.
"Organizations need to embrace and embed a security culture mindset...."
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@James McQuiggan, Security Awareness Advocate, provides expert commentary at @Information Security Buzz.
"Organizations need to embrace and embed a security culture mindset...."
#infosec #cybersecurity #isdots
https://informationsecuritybuzz.com/expert-comments/over-1-billion-medical-records-exposed-online-experts-comments