Internet Vulnerability of Securing Health Data
With healthcare moving more and more in the direction of technology the need to protect patient’s privacy is becoming more demanding. Patient’s health care information, medical history, and personal identification are key information that internet hackers seek. Internet intruders can come from down the street or abroad. Protecting patient’s pertinent data is becoming more and more complicated. Patients enjoy the freedom of being able to access all their pertinent medical information from all over the world. Yet, they don’t realize that many eyes are constantly watching their every move. With the freedom comes the threat of identity theft. No matter how secure a system is someone is always ahead of the game finding ways to slip through the cracks. According to Alan Paller, “there are at least 100 countries actively doing cyber-espionage (M, 2010).”
In the healthcare environment you have many people accessing and using the intranet system. The IT department has the job of monitoring and blocking excess from internet sites without security clearance or certificates out of date. Unknown to the IT department is that the staff can be trying to access these sites which are not allowed. This would put the healthcare organization at risk of scripts slipping in (M, 2010). these scripts are security breaches which are used to steal patient’s personal information. Anti-virus software programs are not looking for these scripts they are looking for files. These scripts can come from social media networks which staff may be accessing. According to Dave Meilek, “most of today’s threats are blended attacks propagated on legitimate sites like Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and many others.” (M, 2010) Attacks can come through emails which have suspicious scripts attached that help them get into the system finding the crack in the network and software. If these scripts are not caught in time they can infect the whole system. Staff must be fully trained and made aware of the threat of a