24% of physicians can't identify phishing emails: 5 things to know

Julie Spitzer -

At least 24 percent of physicians couldn't differentiate phishing emails from legitimate ones, according to Media Pro's 2017 State of Privacy and Security Awareness Report.

Media Pro asked 1,009 U.S. healthcare employees about their privacy and security awareness.

Here are five survey insights.

1. About 18 percent of respondents identified phishing emails as legitimate ones —  physicians were three times worse at identifying phishing emails than their non-physician counterparts. The most misidentified email of the four examples presented was an email from a suspicious "from" address containing an image attachment.

2. Overall, 78 percent of healthcare employees showed some lack of preparedness when it came to common privacy and security threats. That is compared to 70 percent of employees across all industries.

3. Nearly 37 percent of respondents —  and about half of physicians —  scored in the survey's "risk" category, meaning they put their organizations at a serious risk for a privacy or security incident.

4. Twenty-three percent of healthcare employees failed to report a variety of potential security incidents, such as unsecured personnel files or potentially malware-infected systems.

5. Nearly 21 percent of respondents did not recognize some forms of personally identifiable information.

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