Move Over, Banks: Healthcare Industry Now the Top Target for Cybercriminals

​More than 100 million healthcare records were reportedly compromised in 2015, moving the healthcare industry ahead of the financial sector as the most frequent target for cybercriminals, said an April 21 article in The Independent. The report came out of IBM's 2016 Cyber Security Intelligence Index, which collected 2015 data from more than 8,000 client devices in over 100 countries, and said that five of the eight largest healthcare security breaches since 2010 occurred in the first half of 2015. Healthcare records contain information such as credit card data, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, employment information, and medical history that are attractive to hackers because they can be used for identity theft and fraud. IBM Europe's chief technology officer (CTO) related the story of a colleague who had to show hospital staff his scar-less stomach to prove he did not have the $20,000 stomach surgery they billed him for.