This Week in Breach: EmCare
Exploit: Employee email account breach
EmCare: Dallas-based healthcare provider that offers physician services and other healthcare functions
Risk to Small Business: Severe: An unauthorized third party accessed employee emails, allowing them to view sensitive personal information and confidential patient data. Through this vulnerability, hackers were able to access as many as 60,000 individual records, including 31,000 patient records. The company was quick to indicate that they don’t believe any personal data has or will be misused, and it’s unclear why this information was accessed. Nevertheless, EmCare will now bear the costs of providing free credit monitoring services and managing public relations.
Individual Risk: Severe: Employees and patients who received care from the company could have had their name, birth date, age, social security number, and driver’s license number exposed. In some cases, protected health information was also made vulnerable.
Customers Impacted: 60,000
How it Could Affect Your Business: This episode is a reminder that even minor vulnerabilities can have extensive consequences. In this case, accessing just a few email accounts compromised thousands of patient records, creating serious problems for both the victims and the company. Since healthcare organizations are explicitly charged with protecting this information, they need to take every precaution to make sure that their systems are secure. By monitoring where and how hackers use patient and employee information on the Dark Web, providers can offer lasting protection.
In Other News: Cyber-attacks are soaring in 2019
It’s no surprise that cyber criminals are always looking for new vulnerabilities to take advantage of, and we are now becoming inundated, and even accepting, of breaches making daily news headlines. However, their swift increase in the first quarter of 2019 is shocking even by today’s standards.
According to recent report by Malwarebytes, cyber threats are up 235% year-over-year, primarily the result of a surge in ransomware and trojans.
However, bad actors aren’t just increasing the frequency of their attacks. They are changing their focus. The study found that cyber criminals are targeting SMBs because they have less money and resources to spend on cyber defense.
Most prominently, cyber criminals are relying on ransomware. Corporate ransomware attacks are up 195% from the last quarter, and they have grown at an astonishing 500% since April 2018.
It’s no secret that today’s threat landscape is always evolving, and protecting small businesses requires a continual reevaluation of your organization’s most prominent vulnerabilities. However, in order to fight fire with fire, companies must enlist the help of security solutions that are designed to keep a pulse on hacker activities and employee/customer information.