Attacks on health care organizations up 85 percent

[OhioChick]

Attempted cyberattacks on health care organizations have increased 85 percent in the past year, according to SecureWorks, a software-as-a-service vendor.

The company's health care clients have been targeted 20,630 times per day during the second half of 2007 and January of this year, a significant increase over the average rate of 11,146 times per client per day during the first half of 2007, according to a recent release.

SecureWorks researchers blamed the spike on an increase in client-side attacks against organizations, as well as health care institutions' use of large attack surfaces and high volumes of personally identifiable information and computing resources.

The rise in application-based attacks affects all organizations, health care or otherwise, according to SecureWorks researcher Hunter King.

“Client-side attacks have continued to be popular with hackers because compromising an employee's PC is often much easier than hacking directly into an organization's database,” he said. “Many times it is simpler to compromise an employee PC because an employee's position often requires them to have access to the web. A company's databases are also desirable because they have authority to communicate to a company's backend systems, whereas communications coming from an IP address outside the network is often blocked.”

http://www.scmagazineus.com/Attacks-on-health-care-organizations-up-85-percent/article/105312/