As a physician, time is your most valuable asset.
Patients are more invested than ever before in their healthcare. That’s good news, but here’s the fine print: the growing trend towards high deductible plans means that patients who use such plans bear more of the financial burden. And for the downright bad news? It’s up to you, dear clinician, to collect patient financial responsibility. That’s when things get awkward.
Late last week significant healthcare institutions – along with telecommunications, government, and education – were crippled by a rapidly spreading ransomware attack.
Unlike more well known data breaches, ransomware attacks are not based on the value of compromised data to those who should not have access to it – for example, selling a list of usernames and passwords, or stolen credit card data. Ransomware attacks exploit the value of the compromised data to those who should have access to it. In some cases last week, holding medical records hostage, demanding a ransom from medical institutions.
After gaining access to a vulnerable system, malicious software is able to encrypt the data on the physical machine, as well as network shares, while at the same time attempting to infect other systems on the same network. Once encrypted the files are only accessible to those that have the encryption key. It’s that key these data kidnappers offer to provide – for a price.
The truth is that last week’s ransomware shouldn’t have affected anything.