"Health Sector Suffered 337 Healthcare Data Breaches in First Half of Year"

In the first half of 2022, trends in healthcare data breaches showed some minor changes, according to Fortified Health Security's mid-year report on the state of healthcare cybersecurity. The Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights data breach portal revealed that 337 healthcare data breaches have occurred, which affected more than 500 people each in the first half of this year, showing a slight decrease from the 368 breaches that occurred at the same period last year. Hospitals and health systems are still struggling to combat attacks even though the number of reported healthcare cybersecurity breaches has leveled off after skyrocketing increases over the past several years. In the first six months of 2022, the percentage of healthcare breaches attributed to malicious activity increased by more than five percentage points, accounting for nearly 80 percent of all reported incidents. To inform its mid-year report, Fortified Health Security studied incident response, cyber program effectiveness, the MITRE ATT&CK framework, and the growing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in cybersecurity. The organization's analysis of the OCR data breach portal found that healthcare providers accounted for 72 percent of healthcare data breaches in the first half of the year, followed by business associates (16 percent) and health plans (12 percent). Despite a 40 percent drop in the number of records affected in 2022 compared to 2021, the number of records affected in the first half of this year was 138 percent higher than in the first half of 2020. So far this year, more than 19 million records have been implicated in healthcare data breaches. This article continues to discuss key findings shared in Fortified Health Security's mid-year report on the state of cybersecurity in healthcare. 

HealthITSecurity reports "Health Sector Suffered 337 Healthcare Data Breaches in First Half of Year"