Trends of Cybersecurity in the Healthcare Industry

Trends of Cybersecurity in the Healthcare Industry
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Trends of Cybersecurity in the Healthcare
The healthcare sector is increasingly exposed to cyber-attacks, often facilitated by the rise in new technologies that are exploited to improve patient care. The industry is affected by concerns such as distributed denial of service and malware attacks that often impede the delivery of quality care by compromising patient privacy, among other concerns. Organizations are increasingly susceptible to advanced threats and trends resulting mostly from technological advancement. Medical devices are exposed to security concerns, including ransomware, which is a challenge likely to affect the industry. According to Coventry and Branley (2018), the modern healthcare industry thrives on advancements such as electronic health records and improved healthcare infrastructure, which are targeted mostly by fraud. Risks such as compromised patient privacy compel the healthcare industry to embrace modern cybersecurity trends, including blockchain technology, cloud computing, and Internet of Things safeguarding mechanisms such as encryption technology to achieve intended objectives such as delivering quality care and patient safety.
Electronic healthcare technology is currently available in most parts of the developed and developing world. Electronic health records and telehealth, among other recent developments, are inviting cybercrime because they are considered sources of personal data, which can be exploited for various reasons, including fraud (Coventry & Branley, 2018). As such, cybersecurity is needed to guarantee patient safety. One of the recent trends in healthcare cybersecurity is cloud computing (Offner et al., 2020). Cloud computing entails a disregard for centralized data storage and maintenance. Healthcare centers are not easily exposed to data breaches, especially at the organizational level. Apart from data security, the healthcare industry is exposed to improved collaboration and interoperability, thus facilitating the delivery of quality care. Cloud computing in healthcare can thrive against the risks of cyberattacks by embracing encryption technology (Sahi et al., 2016; Offner et al., 2020). The trend guarantees storage, backup, recovery, and transferability of data, which implies that they are prone to cyberattacks, hence the need for robust encryption technology, including strong passwords.
Encryption technology can also be considered a trend in the healthcare industry. In this regard, Offner et al. (2020) allude that healthcare organizations can embrace homomorphic encryption that improves privacy by limiting the unauthorized transfer of encrypted and sensitive data. The focus is on ensuring the involved parties, including healthcare practitioners, can access and share information without decrypting it (Wang & Zhang, 2015). As such, the data is protected from unauthorized access, including instances where nodes are compromised. In fact, relying on homomorphic encryption as a cybersecurity trend guarantees data protection in day-to-day devices such as mobile phones and laptops.
Just like cloud computing, blockchain technology is also decentralized. Primarily employed in the financial industry, blockchain technology is rapidly gaining recognition as a reliable trend in cybersecurity in the healthcare industry (Dubovitskaya et al., 2017). The authors establish that blockchain can be employed to transfer secure medical records ...