The health care industry is expected to be hackers’ most heavily targeted sector in 2017, according to the latest “Data Breach Industry Forecast” from Experian.
The explanation is simple: personal medical data is among the most valuable kinds of information to target because once the data is made inaccessible, health care officials will pay handsomely to get it back.
These so-called ransomware attacks may also expand from blocking a provider’s access to patient information and then selling them the key to reopen the data, to selling the data itself on the dark web or leveraging it for identity theft. In other words, as bad as things have been in 2016, they are going to get much worse next year.
Experian also noted 4 other trends for 2017:
- Aftershock password breaches such as the ones that hit LinkedIn, Dropbox and Yahoo earlier this year.
- Nation-state cyberattacks will widen from espionage to war.
- Criminal focus will shift to payment-based attacks using skimming devices on the new chip-card readers that retailers began adopting this year.
- International data breaches will complicate the operations of multinational companies due to the wide variety of laws and regulations related to computer data.
Source: Cyber Security Intelligence
