Health data hacking incidents spike 42% during pandemic: report

Hannah Mitchell - Monday, March 15th, 2021

As the healthcare industry battled the COVID-19 pandemic, hacking incidents increased by 42 percent from 2019, a March Protenus report found.

Here are six things to know from the report:

There were 758 data breaches in 2020, a 32.5 percent spike from 2019. Of those, 470 were hacking incidents. That's compared to 330 hacking incidents in 2019, marking a 42 percent year-over-year increase.
Twenty percent of breaches were caused by insider-related incidents, where an authorized user either accidentally or maliciously breached data. Combined, these incidents breached nearly 8 million records.
There were 45 incidents of insider wrongdoing, where an authorized user accessed records with malicious intent. These types of breaches affected 241,128 records.
Data breaches of business associates of healthcare organizations affected more than 24 million records.
Eighty-seven percent of breached records involved electronic records, with 13 percent involving paper records.
It took healthcare organizations an average of 187 days to discover they had suffered a breach, an improvement from 224 days in 2019.