Cyber risks growing in health insurance sector: Fitch

The U.S. health insurance industry is facing growing cybersecurity risks, Fitch Ratings Inc. said in a report Tuesday.

The report said this is because of cybercriminals’ increasingly sophisticated techniques amid the expansion of remote health care delivery and growing digitization for insurance transactions, clinical records and billing.

“Health insurers and related third parties that fail to inventory and protect sensitive customer information face increased financial, reputational, operational and regulatory risks from cyberattacks,” the credit rating agency said.

The report said health care’s data make it a target for phishing, ransomware and other attacks. It said insurer networks risk malware’s insertion into legitimate data, while health care provider networks are susceptible to breaches.

The pandemic-driven increase in adoption of remote health care services has heightened exposure to third-party software systems and vendors, the report said.

Insurers “maintain an acute focus on data security and expend significant resources in this area,” but “their systems are certainly not impenetrable, as demonstrated by notable breaches in recent years,” it said.

The U.S. General Accountability Office said in a report Monday that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services could provide more cybersecurity help to health care organizations by routinely sharing threat information.

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