Millions of patients who may be at risk due to poor passwords in health care organizations – here is how safe
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- Nordpass and Nordstelar have assessed Terabytes of data
- The analysis discovered poor password practices in the health care industry
- Organizations lack personnel training and strong policy
Hygiene in hospitals and clinics is essential, but cyber hygiene – despite the fact that it is equally important – is constantly neglected, experts have warned.
A report from Nordpass and Nordstellar has claimed that weak password practices are “dangerous” in healthcare.
Based on an assessment of 2.5 TB of data extracted from various publicly available sources (including the dark web), the two organizations discovered that various medical institutions, including private clinics and hospital networks, all depend on “predictable, recycled or standard passwords” to protect critical systems. As a result, sensitive patient data and possibly their health are placed with a huge risk.
Carelessness
“When the systems that protect patient data are monitored by passwords such as ‘123456’ or ‘P@SSW0RD’, this is a critical failure in cyber security hygiene. In a sector where both privacy and uptime are of vital importance, this kind of inaccuracy can have real consequences,” Karolis Arbacia chat.
The report also states the most used passwords identified in the health care sector. If you use one of these (or a variant), make sure you change them for slightly more difficult to crack:
- Fabrizio19
- 123456
- Melu3@12345
- @Vow2017
- Mercury9.venus8
- password
- Marty1508!
- Carlton@1988
- 12345678
- @Vowcomm2018
- daddy
- 12345
- Durson@123
- P@SSW0RD
- Simetrica
- Raffin2209!
- Asspain28#
- Blacksmith
- neuro
- standard
Policy and training
The teams warn passwords that reflect personal names, simple number patterns or standard configurations, are all excellent goals for brutal force and dictionary attacks, in which cyber criminals automate the process and try out countless combinations until they break in.
To make things worse – one burglary is more than enough to cause damage, because lateral movement can endanger entire networks, expose sensitive data and results in various malware and ransomware infections.
The report emphasizes that institutions in health care “Miss policy of a clear password management or staff training”, therefore they are recommended to enforce strong password policy, to eliminate the use of standard or roll -specific passwords, use a business class Password managerTrain the staff and introduce 2FA where possible.
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