Healthcare Industry Having Worst Email Security Practices

Agari, an email security firm, recently surveyed and revealed results of its “State Of Email Trust” that sheds light about the security system of 147 companies of email communications. Fortune.com reported during second half of February 2015 stating that the survey found the healthcare industry very much lags behind.

An email apparently sent from an usual health insurance company is probably four times fraudulent than an email claiming to be from a social media firm.

Fortune.com published news during second half of February 2015 quoting Patrick Peterson, Founder and CEO of Agari, as saying “The poor people in healthcare industry normally have not had much digital interaction and so they are far behind by a country mile.”

The survey ranked businesses based on their execution of email security procedures and found that only one company scored a perfect 100%. None of the other 13 healthcare organizations surveyed even broke out of the “vulnerable” category with all falling below the middle mark. As a matter of fact, the average score for the sector was a pathetic 17% only.

Comparatively, social media was at 67% in the industry with the highest ranked email security practices and the second lowest scoring industry was European megabanks with a score of 33%.

These low scores are worrying factor due to changes in email threats over the past few years.

Peterson observes that there is an “email arms race” happening and the criminals are successful in targeting email users because it has always been an untidy and dirty medium. Spam is no longer annoying only as fraudulent emails as it now often contains ransomware or malware and if you click on a malicious link, you will have devastating consequences.

Computerworlduk.com published a statement during second half of February 2015 quoting Peterson as saying “we saw a record number of breaches of US data in 2014 and it is steadily increasing extensively forcing FBI to rank cybercrime as one of the topmost law enforcement activities.”

Cybercriminals are gradually collaborating themselves with more sophisticated attacks and hence it is now a challenge for companies to quickly move to new standards because they may be targeted more as they lag behind.

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