Health Care in 2021 Continued to be the Target of Hackers

I'm not sure if the Health Care industry has changed its attitude toward security, but traditionally they have been fairly hostile to the idea of security. Top 10 healthcare breaches in the U.S. exposed data of 19 million.

A tally of public data breach reports so far shows that tens of millions of healthcare records have been exposed to unauthorized parties.

Most of the largest data breaches result from ransomware attacks and the first ten of them account for more than half of all the healthcare records exposed in 2021.

Here are the top 10 organizations, and the number of people impacted by the data breach in each case.

Organization	Records Compromised
Florida Healthy Kids Corporation	3.5 million individuals
20/20 Eye Care Network	3.2 million individuals
Forefront Dermatology	2.41 million patients
NEC Networks	1.65 million people
Eskenazi Health	1.5 million individuals
The Kroger Co.	1.47 million people
St. Joseph’s/Candler health system	1.4 million patients
University Medical Center Southern Nevada	1.3 million people
American Anesthesiology	1.2 million people
Practicefirst Medical Management Solutions	1.2 million patients and employees

The types of data stolen/exposed is not given in detail for each incident, but included things like addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, driver’s license number, and financial information. In other words, everything needed for identity theft. It also, at least in some cases, included health insurance information, as well as clinical and health information.

The total number of records exposed or stolen in 2021 is 45 million, according to HIPAA Journal.

In at least a couple of the incidents, the organizations have been the subject of class-action lawsuits.

Do you remember when everyone was so sure how computerizing all of our medical records was going to make life so good? The victims in these incidents will likely be offered the typical "1 year of credit monitoring." Though the risks they face will last the rest of their lives. In that case of Florida Healthy Kids, that will be most of their lives. Not really covered by 1 year of credit monitoring.

I said that health care has been hostile to secuirty. I'm not sure that was any different from a lot of industries. Though the high-profile nature of what has gone wrong in so many places, is probably changing that attitude. One can hope, anyway.