Giving Compass' Take:

• From phishing attacks to identify theft, Healthcare Informatics Magazine identifies several cybersecurity threats affecting the health care industry to look out for in 2019 — and how to address them.

• Besides some of the general advice given in this article, what can health care providers, organizations and nonprofits do to protect themselves online? Would devoting more resources to IT and staff training help?

• One obstacle may be cost, but here's how nonprofits can increase cybersecurity without breaking the bank.

In recent months, the healthcare industry has been the number one target of cyberattacks, exposing tens of millions of customers’ identities around the world, costing more than $1 billion USD in losses.

Executives from the National Association of County and City Health Officials say that healthcare breaches can cost up to $400 a patient, and yet, only 33 percent of the industry has taken the preventative measure of protecting themselves properly ...

According to one 2018 study, mobile device phishing attacks are up 85 percent, year-over-year, since 2011, and the reason has to do with the increasing amount of data collected by every site and app visited on your mobile device.

The easiest thing to do is go on your phone, do a search on the Internet, and within a couple of hours, you go onto Facebook or Instagram, for example, and you’ll notice that all of a sudden, you have targeted marketing in your feed based on your previous search. That data from your search is also sent to other organizations, which means many things people do online is no longer private, leaving you open for a very targeted phishing attack.

To try to prevent these emails from getting through, we're constantly improving the environment by adding triggers that identify whether our users should trust or not.

Read the full article about cybersecurity threats in health care by Christian Aboujaoude at Healthcare Informatics Magazine.