Health Information Security: Importance and challenges of health information security

1. Information
Security in
Health Sector
Dr. Lasantha Ranwala
MBBS, MD – Health Informatics
Cert. in Ethical Hacking & Cyber Forensic
Senior Registrar in Health Informatics

2. Why Information
Security for
Health Care???

4. 2018 Cost of a
Data Breach
• Source: IBM/Ponemon

5. Data
Breaches

6. “Complete health insurance
credentials can be sold for 10 to
20 times more than a U.S. credit
card on underground markets ”
- Dell Secure Works.
Health Sector
is one of main
the targets for
Hackers

7. What causes the
data breach?

8. Main Cyber
Security Risks
In Healthcare
Limited spending on cyber security
High demand for medical records
in the black market
Ransomware
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
policy
Employee negligence

9. Why
Healthcare
data so…
valuable?
• Difficult to replace :
• Credit card information has a relatively
short shelf life, with new cards
• but health organizations often have
complete profiles of people including
Social Security numbers and medical
health information that is much more
difficult / not possible to change.
• Health data breaches is often not caught as
quickly as financial fraud
• Life threaten conditions Eg: if your records
are contaminated by someone else's
information -different blood group,
• Irreversible - If Information about mental
health or HIV treatments could be made
public, and there's no way to make it
private again

10. Common
Attack types
in Health
Sector

11. WannaCry Attack in 2017

12. Source : https://phys.org/news/2017-05-alarm-global-ransomware.html

13. Challenges in
Health
information
Security
Multiple stakeholders
• Medical Staff
• Paramedical Staff
• Administrative Staff
• Supportive services
• 3 party suppliers
• IT service providers
• Health insurance providers
Multiple data types
• Plain text
• Images
• Audio
• Video
High Sensitivity
Lack of Awareness
Lack of Policies
• Ex: data storage location/ storage capacity /data
decomposition
Lack of Legislations