There are a couple of key takeaways healthcare leaders can internalize from these occurrences.
First, you can never be too lax with cybersecurity issues. Ms. Clinton’s aides have told media that she only sent unclassified information through emails, but that doesn’t guarantee the classification category of incoming messages. Al Jazeera America points to an email sent to Ms. Clinton posted on The Smoking Gun, a website that publishes leaked documents, which read in all capital letters, “THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION COMES FROM EXTREMELY SENSITIVE SOURCES AND SHOULD BE HANDLED WITH CARE.”
If that’s not the X on a hacker’s treasure map, then I don’t know what is. And now in healthcare, given the rising value of personal identifiers on the black market, any piece of protected health information that may be transmitted or accessed through unsecure networks puts patients, and health systems’ cybersecurity, at risk.
Secondly, the comment from the State Department staffer serves as a soapbox for all the frontline IT workers. They all told her not to do it, but she did it anyways. No role is more significant than the other when it comes to cybersecurity, even if you’re the Secretary of State or CEO of a major metropolitan academic medical center.
While diplomatic operations are of a different caliber than patient data, they both deal with the safety and privacy of Americans, and they both warrant the utmost dedication to protection.
