Healthcare marks the only industry where insider threats are more prevalent than those from the outside, according to a Verizon report.
For the report, Verizon analyzed 53,000-plus cybersecurity incidents from the past 12 months, including more than 2,200 breaches, across 67 contributing organizations in 65 countries. The organizations were from nine key industries, including healthcare, which comprised 750 incidents and 536 breaches.
Across industries, analysts detected ransomware in 39 percent of malware-related incidents in the past 12 months. The analysts determined ransomware represented the most prevalent type of malware in 2018, up from the fourth most common type of malware in Verizon's 2017 report.
In healthcare, 56 percent of incidents were attributed to internal threats. The most common cause of a cyberattack was human error (35 percent), followed by misuse (24 percent). In 13 percent of incidents related to system misuse, employees attributed the breach to "curiosity" — for example, if a celebrity had recently been a patient.
The most frequently targeted types of data in the healthcare industry were medical (79 percent), personal (37 percent) and payment (4 percent).
To access Verizon's 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report, click here.