According to a new survey from cybersecurity vendor Netwrix, the most common incidents that healthcare institutions experienced in the cloud in 2020 were phishing (reported by 44% of organizations), ransomware (39%) and data theft by insiders (35%).
Data theft was the hardest of the three to detect; more than half of organizations required days or weeks to flag it, while phishing and ransomware were spotted in hours or less by the overwhelming majority.
The top consequences of cloud breaches in the healthcare sector were unplanned expenses to fix security gaps (24%), compliance fines (23%) and lawsuits (11%).
Most healthcare organizations attribute their cloud security challenges to lack of budget (61%), lack of IT/security staff (56%) and employee negligence (39%). The top security measures healthcare organizations are taking in response to cloud security challenges are encryption (78%), review of access rights (75%) and employee training (65%).
According to the survey, 61% of healthcare organizations store customer data in the cloud and 54% store personal health records there.