Olli Jarva, Synopsys’s Software Integrity Group managing consultant, opined that hackers find healthcare data of more value than credit card or social security details, referring to the recent ransomware attack on Singapore’s government health database.

As many as 1.5 million individuals’, including Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s private medical information was stolen by the cybercriminals.

 “When we are designing and building the systems to be resilient for cyber-attacks, we have to start building security from within, rather than only relying on perimeter defense. This means that before a single line of code is written, we have already started to map down our potential security problems from the design standpoint,” said Jarva about the measures healthcare providers could be taking to safeguard the data.

He added, “Application security problems can be divided to two parts, flaws and bugs. To catch most of these software security problems, we need to identify them early on so that they would not come back to haunt us later on. We have to stay vigilant when it comes to understanding how and what kind of data we are protecting, where it is located, and what kind of security controls we have in place to protect it.”

Jarva commented that such enormous computer systems pose a challenge to security as there may be numerous third-party software attachments with their innate weak security systems which may be difficult to spot and be rectified early on.

Healthcare industries witness other obstacles in shielding data, such as a dearth of security and financial capital and skills to remedy system flaws, if any, and the massive number of devices that need uniform security.