Ethical Hacking in Healthcare

Ethical Hacking in Healthcare

Michael Hence

Capella University

Communications for Information Professionals

IAS5002

Susan Ferebee

October 16, 2016

Ethical Hacking in Healthcare

The Healthcare system relies on patience having confidence in them, to be honest about very personal information concerning health. Keeping medical records safe and maintaining privacy is a top priority and as things change new vulnerabilities begin to surface leaving hospitals and insurance companies vulnerable to data theft. Preventive measures must be taken to counteract any increase in the possibility of a successful attack by a black hat hacker. The best way to put forth the correct measures is by utilizing ethical hackers to carry out testing, find places in systems that are primed for attack, and fix those vulnerabilities.

"A hacker may be defined as any person who enjoys exploring the intricacies of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities" (Hacking, 2016) as cyber.laws.com so eloquently referenced. How does this relate to the healthcare industry? As the industry moves toward implementing new computer-based technology in their system’s there are important things to consider including information security. Hackers want sensitive information because they can sell it on the black market. There are federal regulations that must be followed and if a company becomes complacent the consequences could lay a heavy burden on their business. A recent example is a data breach that ended up costing more than it would have cost to adhere the regulations if they would have hired an ethical hacker to identified and fix the vulnerabilities. According to healthcare IT Security firm Redspin one incident caused:

“Approximately $4.8 million settlement agreement with New York-Presbyterian hospital and Columbia University Medical Center relating to HIPAA compliance violations further affirms our position” (Berger, 2016).

These aforementioned Ethical Hackers hack systems to find vulnerabilities and they divulge those weak points to the people or companies that hire them, thus allowing employer’s to patch those holes preventing bad hackers from finding out how to hack their system’s:

Ethical hacking describes the process of attacking and penetrating computer systems and networks to discover and point out potential security weaknesses for a client, which is responsible for the attack on information technology environment. (Lakshmi, Chenchu, & Basarkod, 2016)

Many people think that hackers are really bad computer nerds. They miss the mark to recognize that criminals and hackers are a broad category that is broken down into bad, good, neutral, and hobby. Media is mainly to blame for the stigma. Ethical hackers  are great and amazingly savvy individuals, who utilize their vast knowledge to help associations, organizations, government, and so on to secure certifications and data on the Internet and beyond.

The healthcare sector is becoming more digitized with record keeping such as the old paper-based systems, which are converting to electronic medical record systems and we also see commonly used forms of technology: