We all know (or should know) that human error accounts for the majority of breaches. Phishing gives hackers entry to a business’s front door by manipulating the employees who work there. Phishing is when a cyberattack is disguised and delivered using email as the carrier or weapon. Through very convincing and cleverly designed messages, the...
Is the healthcare sector uniquely vulnerable to phishing attacks? A recent report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association says yes, with research to back that claim. A team of researchers led by William Gordon, MD of Harvard Medical School and Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital set out to answer the question, “Are...
Remember ransomware, the malicious software that blocks computer access until a ransom demand is paid? The threat was huge and dominated headlines in the past but seems to have slowed down in recent months. Could the decline in publications citing ransomware as the cause of a data breach or loss of data indicate that...
A recent survey conducted by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the consulting firm Accenture surveyed 1,300 U.S. physicians to find out about their experiences and attitudes towards cybersecurity. Unsettling findings in the survey revealed a lack of cybersecurity education among physicians. The five key findings of the survey as reported by the AMA and...
It’s no secret that employees violate security policies. Whether we’d like to admit it or not, there’s a good chance we have all violated a security policy once upon a time. Sometimes, employees violate policies to save time or make their job easier, and sometimes, they don’t even know they’re doing it. How do you...
On October 5, California-based Gold Coast Health Plan (GCHP) informed the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) that a phishing attack may have exposed the protected health information of 37,005 plan members. The attack occurred when hackers successfully tricked a GCHP employee with a phishing email, which allowed the hackers access to that employee’s email account...
Cybercriminals have been targeting the healthcare industry for years. As healthcare has become the second largest sector of the U.S. economy, it should come as no surprise that the industry receives special attention from hackers. Aside from its size, what else accounts for the indisputable interest cybercriminals have in exploiting healthcare? Hackers Set Sights on...
Business email compromise (BEC) scams remain one of the most widely used attack vectors among cybercriminals to date. In fact, cybercriminals are finding so much success in exploiting human vulnerabilities through BEC scams that their frequencies have been dramatically increasing. What is a BEC scam? In a BEC scam, the attacker gains access to an...
A lot can happen in 5 years, and unfortunately, not always for the better. According to a recent report by Juniper Research, Cybercrime & the Internet of Threats 2018, data breaches are expected to reach 146 billion records over the next five years. For cybercriminals to successfully compromise such an extreme number of records, significant...
Small businesses are often thought to be a forgotten entity when it comes to cybercrime. On the surface, it seems like a fair assumption that hackers wouldn’t target small businesses when there are large enterprises with much greater assets. Unfortunately, many small business leaders fall for this “I’m not a target” mentality, when in fact,...
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