Forget your credit card data. The smartest hackers are now targeting your medical records.
Cybercriminals are now going after health-care sites more than they are retailers, financial institutions and utility companies, according to a study published Wednesday by the security firm BitSight Technologies.
BitSight analyzed security performance of companies in the S&P 500 stock index in February and found that not only are health-care and pharma companies being targeted more, but these companies are also much slower in detecting and resolving the security issues, said Stephen Boyer, BitSight's co-founder and chief technology officer.
"We were expecting utilities to be one of the worst performers, but they weren't so bad. The one that surprised us was that health care scored so low. Anything that falls below retail is a little bit scary to us," Boyer said.
He said that health-care companies lacked many of the basic protections that security experts would expect in a company's network.