Effect of Cyber attacks over financial and health care industries

I Personally think that the general target industries of cyber attackers would be healthcare or financial industries because these industries help them benefit immensely. According to an article published by telegraph, every minute of every day, a bank is under cyberattack and Major cyberattacks have increased by the factor of 63% on the healthcare industries according to the survey conducting in 2017.

Financial Institutions and Banks:

Formerly, Robbers and thieves used to come to banks physically to rob and attack the banks. But these days, since everything is on web worldwide, era comes of the cyberattacks on bank i.e attack on the bank’s networks and systems. Incidents like, hackers successfully stealing 100 million dollars from Bangladesh’s central bank in February 2016, Cyber criminals more than 31 million dollars from the Russia’s central bank. According to FBI reports more than 500 million records have been stolen from financial institutions over the past 12 months as the result of cyberattacks. PricewaterhouseCoopers, a law firm centered in Philadelphia found that 45 % of financial institutions have suffered from cybercrime in the year of 2016, compared to all other industries which is 35%. These sort of attacks show that even though big financial institutions spend huge amounts of money on security, there can still be loop holes. All organizations should take and maintain stake of all their profit on the network and should assess the risks that different classes of assets face. They should also ensure employees are adequately trained in  awareness since they are on the front line and can be helpful in spotting potential vulnerabilities before they become a major problem.No financial institution can afford to be complacent because any organization can be the victim of a costly security breach, regardless of size. Security is too important not to be given due consideration, and the threats against the financial sector look like they will only continue to escalate.

One of the common things in all the cyberattacks is lack of basic malware protection to defend against an attack. In South Korea cyber hacks, a basic malware was enough to stagnate the economy of an entire nation for several days. In the case of the DDoS attacks in 2012,  where malware wasn’t directly involved, it still succeeded in infecting the servers that comprised in attacker’s network.Even more damaging attacks, such as SWIFT and Caberp, involved custom malware that never saw the light of day prior to being used to steal millions or even billions of dollars. Hence, the traditional procedure based endpoint protection and security protocols can no longer be used to protect financial institution.

Healthcare Industry:

Health care providers are also one of the major targets of cyber attackers because they are extremely vulnerable and data is very sensitive, they cannot afford to be hijacked or hacked and prefer to pay the ransom. According to a survey, Cyberattacks On Healthcare Grew 63% In 2016. Since healthcare firms these are more electronically equipped and they communicate sensitive health data like Electronic Medical Records(EMR), cyber security plays predominant role in healthcare industry.

A cyberattack on MedStar Health, a health care system serving Maryland and the Washington D.C area, forced the hospital to shut down its systems to avoid the spread of the malware, Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in California announced in February that it paid a ransom of $17,000 bitcoin to unlock its data from the cyber criminals. North Memorial Health Care of Minnesota reported that an unencrypted laptop was stolen and nearly 10000 patient’s Medical records were affected, who further agreed to pay $1,550,000 to settle the charges for violating HIPAA security rule of encrypting data. University of Mississippi Medical Center admitted the incident of theft of a laptop from its Medical Intensive Care Unit. Though the laptop was password protected, the Medical records of 10,000 patients stored on a cloud drive the could be accessed by an uncomplicated and unencrypted login credentials and went on to pay $2.75 million to settle alleged violations of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996). Hence the Medical Data needs to be encrypted and secured.