Hospitals and health systems are looking to the federal government to help them deal with cybersecurity breaches.
Those breaches, which at one time might only cost a ransom of $50,000, now often cost millions of dollars in damage – and in the case of one large health system, more than $100 million.
Insurance against such problems, moreover, generally pays only a fraction of the cost of the damage done.
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, often through the latter’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, offer some assistance to hospitals, as does the Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center, but the frequency of attacks has both providers and government scrambling: through June of this year HHS’s Office of Civil Rights recorded 256 data breaches and hacks, up 72 percent from the same time period last year.
Learn more about the cybersecurity challenges hospitals face and the help they seek addressing them in the Politico article “Health systems want government help fighting off the hackers.”