Why Health Care Providers Are Prime Targets for Ransomware Attacks (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: First of all, every industry today is targeted by ransomware. But the reason why so many health care providers are making headlines about ransomware is because hackers target health care organizations because they possess a lot of patient information. They possess a lot of personally identifiable information. And this type of information is gold. For example, if you look on the dark web, the price of a stolen credit card is $5 for a validated credit card. But a price for personal information, passport, social security number could range from $400 to $6,500 per person because you can create a fake identity and use it to create accounts in various places. So health care organizations have patient data, their records. It's a goldmine for hackers. And they know that they can derive value out of it. Secondly, there's a lot of OT and IoT devices used in health care organizations that could be older and not patched, but represent an avenue for tech. For example, you might have a echocardiogram machine or an insulin monitor. And those are medical devices, but they could be using old software that's not up to date. And the hackers are looking for the weakest link. And because of the presence of so many OT and IoT devices in health care organization, it also makes them easier targets for the bad guys to get in. But I also would like to say that actually, health care organizations have some amazing resources at their disposal. For example, we've partnered with NHISEC, National Health Care Information Sharing Services, where it's an organization that shares threat intelligence and cybersecurity information and provides tools to different companies. It's led by a terrific leader, Errol Weiss. And we partnered with NHISEC where companies in NHISEC can get access to security scorecard for free. So we provide them for free threat intelligence, attack surface and the various other companies that do the same and help protect the health care organizations that play such a critical role in our society from the bad actors. And so I think that this is yet another reminder that when you're a health care provider, it's so critical for you to do continuous monitoring of your attack surface, to have a ransomware 911 retainer for your health care organization, almost like a hotline where you can dial it 24-7. And if you ever get hit with ransomware, you're going to get connected to experts who are going to help you diagnose the issue, negotiate with the bad guys, understand if the data has been backed up and it could be retrieved. So monitor your attack surface, partner with NHISEC, get a ransomware 911 retainer for your health care organization, and you're going to be better off than a lot of others. That would be my advice. I'd love to hear from the rest of you any tips, any suggestions, any thoughts on the topic, because I think it's a crucial topic for us to address in this day and age.