Healthcare providers are increasingly becoming the targets of hacking and other cyberattacks, with a 600-percent increase in the past 10 months, Tech News World reported.
Many of the attacks are aimed at hospitals. Although those facilities contain information on patients' health, the hackers are usually interested in the same information as when they break into other databases.
"They seek to make a profit on these attacks," Carl Leonard, senior manager at Webscene Security Labs, told TechNewsWorld.
"The personal identifiable information that a hospital has is very valuable because it's supplemented by links into insurance documents and bank accounts," he added.
Credit card information can be used to fuel more cyberattacks by setting up command-and-control servers or cloud space.
Community Health Systems, one of the largest U.S. hospital groups, fell victim to a cyber attack from China, which led to the left of 4.5 million patients' Social Security numbers and other personal information, according to Reuters.
Patient names, addresses, birth dates, telephone numbers and Social Security numbers were stolen from the health care group.
Great care is taken to control the sharing of personal healthcare information in the U.S. That makes the growing theft of such data seem quite ironic.
"Your doctor can't even discuss with someone else what's wrong with you," Robert Strang, CEO of the Invetigative Management Group, told TechNewsWorld. "But we can have one individual download millions of records from healthcare systems."
