HITRUST to sponsor study on healthcare breaches

The Health Information Trust (HITRUST) Alliance will sponsor a study to analyze the effects of cyber attacks on healthcare organizations.

Citing research from the Identity Theft Resource Center, a release from HITRUST noted that nearly 42.5 percent of all breaches identified in 2014 were against the healthcare organizations and for the most part, the details are too sparse to understand their magnitude.

The HITRUST Cyber Discovery Study will last for about 90 days, during which participants will use equipment, software and other resources provided by the alliance, which has selected Trend Micro to provide support and services, to monitor and analyze their networks for threats. Participants will turn over anonymized data to HITRUST for analysis and to establish an industry benchmark to battle cyber attacks. 

HITRUST's Common Security Framework (CSF) is used by healthcare organizations to share and manage sensitive data.