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Health care is the only industry in which internal actors are the biggest threat to a company's data security, according to a Verizon survey.

The telecommunications giant's Protected Health Information Data Breach Report found that nearly 60 percent of incidents at health care entities involved insiders.

The findings are based on an analysis of 1,368 security incidents involving patient medical records in 27 countries. The study included both confirmed breaches and security incidents where information was at risk but not confirmed as compromised, for instance, the theft of a medical professional's laptop computer.

In the survey, Verizon emphasized the severity of internal threats, given the data-heavy nature of health care.

“The health care industry relies on the timely and up-to-date accessibility of highly regulated data to a large percentage of employees,” it said. “The ability to access information quickly to allow a team of care providers to make point-of-care decisions is vital.”

Employers may take some comfort, however, in the fact that not all of the internal breaches were malicious in nature. In fact, human error was the cause in a little more than half of the breaches that featured an internal actor, the study found.

But in cases where there was a motive, it was most often financially based. Patients' personal information provides a convenient means to commit various types of fraud, including tax return fraud or opening lines of credit, the report said.

In addition, curiosity about, for example, an acquaintance or well-known person's admission to a hospital, and convenience are other leading motives behind insiders' data breaches.

Other key findings from the survey include:

  • In 66 percent of the incidents studied, unauthorized access was gained through abuse of privilege credentials. In 17 percent, it was gained via physical access points.
  • Ransomware is the top malware variety used in health care attacks by a wide margin. Seventy percent of incidents involving malicious code were ransomware infections.
  • The information most often compromised in breaches is contained in databases and paper documents, although medical device hacking has been a high-profile problem as well.
  • Health care companies are not implementing basic security measures. For example, lost and stolen laptops with unencrypted personal health information remain a cause of breaches.