It’s a scary world that we live in now. Before, all we had to worry about was criminals invading our home and robbing us for physical good, but know we have to protect our valuable information since cybercrimes are on the rise. Hackers are out there to steal information and regular citizens aren’t the only ones in harm’s way.
Now that the Internet has redefined our lives and businesses, break-ins are virtual and the new currency is information — personally identifying information, to be exact. The rush to an online economy has stood conventional wisdom on its ear, and all the locked front doors on the planet won’t make us any safer. They won’t protect our governments, either, as Virginia’s administration is now learning. Hackers claim to have broken into a state-run prescription drug database — run by the Prescription Monitoring Program — last month and stolen or deleted 8 million patient records and 35 million prescription records. They demanded a $10 million ransom for the safe return of the compromised data, or threatened to sell it to the highest bidder.
As the debate continues over whether this is the biggest cybercrime attack in history, the reality for regular folks is frightening: There are no safe havens anymore, and not even governments — who we entrust with our most private information — are immune. We can lock our doors at night, but we have no control over the myriad third parties that touch our data after we relinquish control.
If the government can’t even keep their valuable information safe, what hope to we as regular citizens have? None so far. While the state investigates whether an actual breach occurred, officials have confirmed that all of the compromised data is safely stored on backups and the systems themselves have been secured from further attacks.
But while this high-stakes game of cybercrime brinkmanship plays out, the system in question, the Prescription Monitoring Program, remains offline and unavailable. This unresolved outage is costing the state and its citizens dearly, and calls into question plans to overhaul the entire health care system with adequate doses of technology and process.
We should be really worried right now since the government is looking to have our health records go digital. As health records go digital, can governments at all levels assure us what’s happening in Virginia won’t also happen to electronic health records (EHRs) around the world? Although public-sector agencies almost always claim to be using the latest security tools and processes, they can’t guarantee our government-run health care infrastructure will be inviolable.
But as governments hurriedly plan and deploy platforms, systems and processes to automate the business of managing bureaucracy and accelerating service delivery, the risk of cybercrime only grows more and more each day. Massive new public data repositories represent irresistible targets of opportunity for identity thieves. It’s fair to question whether governments at any level possess sufficient technical and process maturity to keep our data safe from cybercriminals.
As citizens, we can only hope that the government we trust our most valuable information with can figure out how to stop these cyber attacks and create the best possible security infrastructure in place before all our identities are stolen.
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Tuesday, 22 September 2009
If Governments Aren't Safe, Are We?
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