I read a scary statistic this morning. The year 2014 turned out to be the biggest year in cyber hacks and attacks. They cost businesses and individuals billions, not to mention the personal mayhem they cause people.
Now we learn cyber attacks are costing our medical system. In fact, hacks against the health care industry have doubled so far in the 2010s. Nobody is immune. It’s estimated 90% of the health care industry got breached in the past two years. These criminal cyber attacks costs medical care providers $6 billion a year. It took an episode like a major hack like what happened to Anthem Inc. to wake many experts up to this threat. There’s a reason cyber criminals salivate over medical records, which contain social security numbers and not to mention intimate details about your health. Medical records sell 20 times as much as credit card information. The thief can open up a credit line or get free medical care by using the victim’s insurance ID. Well, free for the criminal; the victim and victim’s insurance company would be paying for it. In 2014 alone, around 88 million people’s information were compromised. That’s double the number of victims in 2010. And 2015 is already even worse. This year 80 million Anthem records were compromised. So were 11 million Premara Blue Cross records. You do the math.
My question is: Why isn’t the media talking about this? It’s one thing for credit cards to be compromised. But when medical records are compromised, health and life are on the line. If somebody’s medical records are compromised, someone could get misdiagnosed, and accidentally killed because of mixed records caused by cyber criminals. Of course I doubt cyber criminals care if their victims live or die. But the tech world and the media must let the public know of such dangers in the medical community. And they need to be taught how to protect themselves. What is it going to take?