The 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) promotes the security and privacy of employee health information. HIPAA seeks to facilitate efficient and effective electronic transfer of healthcare information between healthcare facilities as well as protect patients’ privacy. The Health and Human Services Department (HHS) was mandated to develop with security standards that they issued in 2003. The resulting health security standards rule gives patients rights over their health information and set standards on who can access it. The act further articulates precautions that all healthcare providers must take to protect and secure electronically collected health information. Agencies, organizations, and individuals classified as covered entities must comply with HIPAA.

A data breach may be viewed as the accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration or unauthorized disclosure or, access to data . Over the years, thesecurity broadcasts are generally replete with numerous incidences of data breaches across the globe. Therefore, it is little surprise that 1 in 4 business have experiencedthis type of incident . The significant financial impact is also unmistakable as the total average cost is estimated to be 3.62 milliondollars, which equates to in excess of$300,000 dollars .

The number of reported incidences of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) continue to rise over the last few years. While there is no precise statistics, which may be attributable to the limited awareness of these attacks or reluctance to share attack incidences, it is recognized that many organizations in various countries have fallen victims to APT attacks. Their knownvictims include global technology firms, financial services, military and defense entities, where the threat actors or attackers are usually state sponsored groups and cyber mercenaries.

Malware continues to be one of the top factors contributing to network compromise which may eventually lead to data breach. Malware attack has the costliest impact on organizations with an average total cost amounting to$2.4 million .This means close to $7,000 per day or $200,000 per month is incurred by victims across the globe. Moreover, these attacks cause significant damage to an organization’s infrastructure by compromising data, preventing or slowing down the running of computers and resulting in the loss of vital information.

Mobile devices have enabled improved benefits of computing which have likely resulted in increased efficiencies for the organization and users. However, with the potential benefits come increased challenges in maintaining a stable and secured environment at work. Mobile devices are one of the most vulnerable vectors in an organization. As its ubiquity continues to expand, organizations continue to be challenged in developing suitable security controls to minimize vulnerabilities. These challenges are generally inherent in the device and use patterns. This dilemma has therefore placed increased challenges on the information security team to defend against mobile threats, maintain security standards and minimize risks.

The healthcare industry processes a large volume of sensitive personal data of billions of people worldwide. A security breach therefore has significant financial, personal and organizational consequences. It is therefore hardly surprising that the cost of data breach in healthcare organizations more than double the average cost in other sectors. According to the 2017 Cost of Data Breach Study, healthcare organizations had an average cost of $380 for each lost or stolen record . This is compared to the average global cost of data breach being $141.

In 2016, the FBI warned of the rise of the incidents of ransomware. Since then, these malicious applications have continued to grow in sophistication. Evolving new cyberattack modelsare being developedresultingin attackers being able to launch more sophisticated and profitable attacks on a larger global scale. Consequently, the incidences of these attacks have doubled to 27 percent of cyberincidents over the previous year, 2016 . To put this trend in perspective, there were 638 million ransomware attacks in 2016, per the SonicWall GRID 2017 Threat Network .This means that organizations across multiple countries have been targeted with close to 4 million ransomware attacks per day in 2017.

ATM is one of the great convenience of this modern financial age. However, ATMs have been plagued with increased attacks as criminals are exploiting hardware and software vulnerabilities to exploit ATMs to obtain large sums of cash.A Trend Micro andEuropol2017 Report[1] highlighted that the use of ATM malware has evolved significantly as the scope and scale of these attacks have grown. This latestdevelopment is attributable to several factors.

With the rise of cyberincidents, organizations continue to search for effective tools and strategies to fight against cybercrimes and to build resilience in their environment. Based on the 2017 Trustwave Report[1], cyberincidents were spread across economic sectors and regions during the reporting year. Every single region was affected, with North America and the Asia-Pacific regions accounting for the bulk of reported cases (70%). The retail industry had the single largest share of cyberincidents (22%), followed by the food and beverage (20%), financeand insurance (14%), hospitality (12%). Technology, transport, entertainment, travel and other sectors accounted for the remaining 32%. These revealing statistics emphasize the continued urgent need for organizations to shore up the cybersecurity defenses while proactively engaging in offensive tactics.