Tens of Millions of Americans Had Their Sensitive Health Data Breached Last Year

Information about our health represents one of those things we care about the most. Although nobody likes it if it gets breached, it happened to tens of millions of Americans in just one year. According to an analysis of data provided by the Department of Health and Human Services, roughly 50 million people from the US got their health data breached in 2021, as The Hill reveals.

Accessing the health information of a person is surely something we all want to avoid, but that’s what many residents of half of the American states had been through – about 1 in 10 people. Furthermore, health care organizations from each American state except for South Dakota had to deal with data breaches.

A profitable activity

Mac McMillan, who’s CEO of cybersecurity company CynergisTek, explains more about the evil scheme, as speaking for Politico.com:

Unfortunately, the industry is pretty much easy pickings, and they’re hitting it because they’re getting paid,

It’s [not] gonna slow down until we either get more serious about stopping it, or blocking it, or being more effective at it. From the cybercriminals’ perspective, they’re being successful, they’re getting paid, why would they stop?

According to CybintSolutions.com, 95% of breached records from six years ago came from three industries: retail, government, and technology. The same source offers a pretty neat but surprising explanation:

The reason isn’t necessarily because those industries are less diligent in their protection of customer records. They’re just very popular targets because of the high level of personal identifying information contained in their records.

According to the same website, there’s a hacker attack occurring once every 36 seconds upon computers connected to the internet.

Surely many would say that having powerful antivirus software installed is the best way to prevent a hack, but we believe that human vigilance can be even more efficient.