Ann Arbor-based Michigan Medicine experiences an estimated 500,000 hacking attempts daily, from robocalls to more elaborate schemes, MLive reported.
While most of the cyberattack tries are simple and easy to deflect, about 60 to 80 a day are "highly sophisticated," Michigan Medicine CEO Marschall Runge, MD, PhD, told the news outlet.
"It's not if you get attacked, it's when," he said in the June 26 story. "We've made great advancements in understanding diseases like diabetes by studying very large populations. For all the great things that resulted from the digitization from all we do, it's resulted in these massive, connected databases ... It opens the potential door, or another route, to attack health records."
Michigan Medicine has taken steps to prevent cyberattacks, including teaming up with Southfield, Mich.-based Beaumont Health and Traverse City, Mich.-based Munson Healthcare in 2018 to create the Michigan Healthcare Security Operations Center, according to the story. The academic system has also trained staff on how not to fall for "phishing" schemes; employees went from failing about 20% of phishing tests to doing so in "very rare occurrences," Dr. Runge said.
The health system also regularly screens for irregularities in its network that could indicate a hack, has "white hat" hackers try to find cyber vulnerabilities, and stores data in the cloud as a backup in case of a cyberattack, the publication reported.