Cyber Defense eMagazine June 2020 Edition

) Phishing
On August 20, 2018, Portland, Oregon-based Legacy Health notified 38,000 patients that a phishing
attack might have breached their data iii . Further their investigation revealed that unauthorized third party
gained access to some of the email accounts of employees that may have contained some patient
information e.g. patients’ name, dates of birth, health insurance information, billing information, medical
information regarding care received at Legacy Health and, in some cases, social security numbers and
driver’s license numbers.
In a phishing campaign, an attacker poses as a legitimate person or entity in an email to get the target to
provide valuable information, such as credentials, or click on a link that results in ransomware being
downloaded on the victim’s machine. Employees who are not careful may click on the link or provide
confidential details which may lead to fraud. According to the study conducted by Cofense “Payment
Notification” emerged as the top healthcare phishing attack Subject iv .The 2018 Verizon data breach
report revealed that phishing attacks are not only prominent, they’re also on the rise, with 43% of data
breaches stemming from such incidents v .
c) Insider threats
On Jan 20, 2016, Wall street journal reported that five people, including two former research scientists of
the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), were charged in the U.S. with scheming to steal trade
secrets and sold them to the organizations operating in China vi . The stolen data included intellectual
property such as information regarding the research development of multiple biopharmaceutical products.
In 2018, both scientists pleaded guilty to committing intellectual property theft, but the exact amount of
financial damage has yet to be calculated. Additionally, insider threats not only include employee stealing
data but vary from incidents happening due to error or carelessness to theft of employee laptop containing
confidential data vii .
d) Technology management issues
On Dec. 26, 2018, UW Medicine reported that misconfigured database lead to the exposer of patient data
on the internet for several weeks. The exciting part is that breach was discovered by a patient looking for
his own name on google and ended up finding the data related to UW medicine files containing patients’
names, medical record numbers, and a description and purpose of the information viii . Other than
misconfigured databases or servers, lack of appropriate IT security implementation in the organization or
IT vendors who are providing or managing IT solution on your behalf may be the reason for a data breach.
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