Doctors and Mobile Devices – Not A Secure Mix

Skycure, a mobile device protection vendor released its new mobile threat intelligence report and the data is not pretty.  One thing the report says is that 40% of the mobile devices are at risk of a network attack over a four month window.

Out of 51 million device scans in 2015, Skycure found almost 13,000 malicious apps.  They also say that 27+ million devices with medical apps installed might be infected with a high risk malware.

Aetna’s CSO, Jim Routh, has a horrible but accurate description of your cell phone.  He says “The mobile phone is the best surveillance device in history,” – “Each device is a potential attack target for personal data, company data, and, in the healthcare industry, the private medical and health information of patients and customers.  It’s imperative that both mobile users and their employers understand the risk and how to stay safe.”

Other statistics include:

• 80% of doctors use mobile devices to assist their day to day practice
• 28% store patient data on their mobile devices
• 11% of mobile devices are running an OUTDATED operating system with HIGH SEVERITY vulnerabilities that might have stored patient data
• 14% of mobile devices containing patient data likely have no passcode on them.
• 27.79 million devices with medical apps installed might also be infected with high risk malware.
• A whopping 52% of devices use passcodes – meaning half of the devices do not use a passcode.
• While 88% of iOS users were using iOS 9, only 3% of Android users were using Marshmallow (Android 6).  I have written about this before and it is a place where Apple kills Google hands down.

Suffice it to say, the healthcare community has a big challenge ahead of it and it is not going away any time soon.

Information for this post came from IT Wire.

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