There is a healthy fear within the cybersecurity community that hackers can exploit security vulnerabilities in medical devices with relative ease, thereby endangering patients and putting a healthcare organization’s data assets at serious risk.

A study IBM Security and conducted by Ponemon Institute found that the average cost of a data breach globally is $3.86 million, a 6.4 percent increase from the 2017 report.

According to the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, the healthcare sector fell prey to more cyber incidents through data breaches than any other critical infrastructure area in 2015.

How can security operations professionals within healthcare organizations balance the need to meet regulatory mandates while securing critical network infrastructure and patient data?

Hospitals need to do a better job of encrypting patient data to address the spiraling scale of security breaches, concludes a new report from healthcare IT security company Redspin. The report also notes that healthcare organizations need to bridge the gap between the demand from doctors and nurses using their own devices in the workplace (BYOD) and enacting the necessary security measures to ensure patient information contained on those devices is protected if they are lost or stolen.