Denise Anderson, president and CEO of the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center, said that patient data is very valuable to criminals and can be used to steal identities. She added that cyber criminals targeting the health care sector are also after intellectual property related to medical research and technology.
“The health sector is highly interconnected and sensitive data is continuously moving between entities,” Anderson said. Another challenge the health care sector faces is that medical devices, which are expensive and operate 24 hours a day, cannot easily be taken offline to fix vulnerabilities and are not easily replaceable because some run on operating systems that are no longer supported, Anderson explained.
