Healthcare Security Breach Predicted in 2018

It's been a tough year for cyber security with more phishing scams, ransomware, state-sponsored attacks, and new attack vectors being discovered and making the headlines. But, what should we be watching out for in 2018? Tim Erlin, VP, Product Management and Strategy at Tripwire has give his predictions.

Healthcare security breach
“We’ll see a significant breach in the healthcare industry in 2018. With a growing focus on the vulnerability of medical devices and electronic healthcare records, the hospitals, insurers and manufacturers will all be in the crosshairs of cybercriminals in 2018. By and large, the broad healthcare industry isn’t prepared for these kinds of attacks. We saw a taste of the potential impact in 2017 with the WannaCry incident and the UK NHS. Ransomware doesn’t stay hidden, but there are lots of attackers who aren’t quite as noisy.”

Cloud data
“We haven’t hit bottom yet on the cloud data leaks, so we’re likely to see more misconfigurations that lead to accessible data. These will taper off in 2018 as the defensive tools, and the providers themselves, catch up with protecting against this particular misconfiguration. Still, the movement of valuable data to the cloud isn’t slowing down, and data is money for cybercriminals. I expect that we’ll see more cloud-based compromises in 2018, beyond publicly accessible S3 buckets. These may take the form of compromised credentials, other misconfigurations, exploited vulnerabilities, or other ‘classic’ attacks that have migrated to the cloud.”