Healthcare hit the No 1. spot for cyberattacks last year, though no industry was immune from such incidents, according to an IBM cybersecurity report.
The authors of the report say healthcare rising to the top of the list did not come as a surprise, considering that at the end of 2015, IBM declared it the year of the healthcare security breach.
Five of the eight largest healthcare security breaches so far this decade--those in which more than 1 million records were compromised--took place during the first six months of 2015, according to the report. More than 100 million healthcare records were compromised last year.
Unauthorized access remained a leading cause of incidents in all industries, growing to 45 percent of incidents in 2015 from 37 percent in 2014. And in 60 percent of cases, attacks were carried out by insiders. While an insider might be an employee, it also could be a business partner or other third party, an area where healthcare has been ranked poorly on risk management.
Roughly one-third of attacks were carried out by inadvertent actors--people without malicious intent who might be duped by a phishing scam or lured into opening a malware-laden email attachment. That percentage was down from nearly half the previous year, indicating that efforts to educate staff about cybersecurity are paying off.
Overall, IBM reports an average of 3.4 cyberattacks per week across industries, compared with two per week in 2014.
To learn more:
- here's the report