ATLANTA — Credit unions and other financial institutions are hardly alone in the eyes of cyber crooks.
SecureWorks Inc. said it's seen an 85% increase in attempted attacks on healthcare providers from the first half of 2007 through January 2008–from 11,146 per healthcare client per day to an average of 20,630.
The managed security services company, whose client roster includes hundreds of credit unions, said there are several reasons for the intense new focus on healthcare organizations, in addition to the obvious–hospitals and other healthcare organizations store lots of personal financial data.
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They also have "large attack surfaces (large, open networks) in which hackers can break in," SecureWorks said, and large amounts of valuable computing resources.
Hunter King, a security researcher with SecureWorks in Atlanta, said client-side attacks, in which an employee's PC is targeted, make up many of the attacks.
"This is true not only for our healthcare clients, but also for our clients in the financial, retail, technology, and utility sectors," King said. "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."
Once that happens, the hackers have a lot of ways to then access the back-end systems where data is kept. King said some of the most popular types of malware being used in client-side attacks are the Rbot, Storm Worm, Prg and Pinch trojans.
For more information, go to www.secureworks.com/research/threats/healthcareattacks.
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