The healthcare industry holds some of the most valuable data that attract hordes of cyber criminals to it. In February of 2015, history was made when about 78 million Anthem customers were hacked; till date, it’s the largest breach that healthcare has ever seen. This, however, was only one of the many hacks made throughout 2015, which eventually ended up compromising close to 113 million records.

There is an ever-increasing need to spread awareness among people and healthcare organizations to fight this ongoing war against hackers. Information security needs to be enhanced and life should be made as hard as possible for the intruding parties. 

One key protection measure against cyber accidents or attacks is making regular backups of your data.

Backups are important. There must always have be a set of the data that you used in your daily work or operations stored in other places in case your servers, laptops, desktops or any other devices are compromised or exploited by a hacking event.

Many hacking events have proved calamitous to organizations that when the attack surface are penetrated by hackers and they have accessed to data and files stored within the organization, hackers have always used ransomware tactics that encrypts data and files which prevents organization being able to access it.

The NotPetya attack on Maersk for example had cost the giant shipping conglomerate over $300 million in June 2018. It took nine days for the company to restore what was crippled in 7 minutes because of the NotPetya worm-virus*.

The attack encrypted over over 49,000 laptops and print capabilities, 1200 applications of which 1000 were complete destroyed and around 3500, out of 62000 servers, were destroyed. The company managed to recover its operations due to the fact that it had backed up its data but had to completely rebuild its applications from scratch.

It holds true to healthcare organizations as well as most healthcare organizations devices are inter-connected to each other.

For example, in September 29 2020, a ransomware attack resulted in EHR outages at all 400 Universal Healthcare Services’ care sites for about three weeks and resulted in about $67 million in lost operating income, labor expenses, and overall recovery costs, according to a recent UHS earnings. The IT team quickly took the whole operations offline**.

While the information technology applications were offline, patient care was delivered safely and effectively at the facilities across the country utilizing established back-up processes, including offline documentation methods. 

The value of backups have been critical in sustaining the operations of companies despite there may be some downtime in re-building applications and software. Some of the methods how backup may be done include:

Back Up to an External Drive: Perhaps the easiest and most amenable ways of backing up data with certain pros and cons of it.

Use a Cloud Storage Service: Backup purists will say this isn’t technically a backup method, but for most people, it serves a similar enough purpose.***

*https://www.i-cio.com/management/insight/item/maersk-springing-back-from-a-catastrophic-cyber-attack

**https://ir.uhsinc.com/news-releases/news-release-details/universal-health-services-inc-reports-2020-fourth-quarter-and

***https://www.howtogeek.com/242428/whats-the-best-way-to-back-up-my-compute