How does cybersecurity in the healthcare sector fare when compared to other major industries?
Not particularly well, according to one benchmark study.
The Third Annual Industry Benchmarking Report, published by BitSight, includes rankings and information for six industries in which protected information is particularly vulnerable and valuable. The report ranks the following six industry sectors from greatest to least in terms of cybersecurity performance:
• Finance
• Federal Government
• Retail
• Energy/Utilities
• Healthcare
• Education
The rankings are based on an algorithm that accounts for security metrics on events, diligence and user behaviors.
BitSight reports stagnant performance across the healthcare industry as a whole, with its cybersecurity ranking sitting in nearly the same position since August 2014. While the healthcare industry accounts for the second lowest percentage of companies that were vulnerable to the April 2014 Heartbleed data breach, a large percentage of healthcare companies are vulnerable to other types of cybercrime. Some estimates number healthcare data breaches in the past few years in the thousands.