If you need legal advice about healthcare cybersecurity breaches, and you want to know more about claiming data breach compensation, we can help you.
We can offer No Win, No Fee arrangements for healthcare data breach compensation claims. With the healthcare sector often leading the way in terms of the volumes of breaches, we already represent a large number of victims claiming for incidents in this sector.
And research indicates that it’s getting worse and is possibly set to get even worse in the future as well. For the victims, it’s important to know your rights.
Growing healthcare cybersecurity breaches
Research indicates that the number of healthcare cybersecurity breaches is growing. This is likely down to a number of factors that we already know about, such as:
- A lack of funding in the healthcare industry (particularly in the NHS);
- A lack of cybersecurity being treated as a priority by healthcare organisations (including private ones);
- The increasing sophistication of attacks;
- The fact that the healthcare industry is a target for hackers.
We saw in the 2017 WannaCry incident just how easy it can be for hackers to have a serious impact on the NHS. That particular malware targeted older and more outdated systems that are often not as secure. With some parts of the NHS still reliant on old technology, they were hit hard.
And the value of healthcare data cannot be understated. It’s usually very private and incredibly sensitive, so its value to hackers can be high, and the impact on the victim can be severe.
The healthcare industry appears to be struggling to keep up to ensure they have the means to defend attacks. One study suggested that in 2018 the healthcare industry clearly led the way in terms of the volume of attacks across the world. This comes as no surprise to us given the large number of cases we have that involve healthcare data breaches.
What can you do about healthcare cybersecurity breaches?
Victims can be entitled to make a claim for compensation as a victim of healthcare cybersecurity breaches. When we assess the claims that we take on, two of the key things we look at are:
- Was the incident preventable?;
- What’s the impact on the victim?
If a healthcare cybersecurity incident was preventable, the organisation at the centre of the breach can be liable to compensate you. We then need to look at the level of the impact, and with healthcare data usually being incredibly personal and sensitive medial information, the impact of usually serious.
Data breach compensation amounts can be quite high for healthcare breaches because of the impact the loss of control over medical data can have for the victim.