Real-Time Monitoring of Health Security Attacks with R-based Data Visualization Dashboard

Real-Time Monitoring of Health Security Attacks with R-based Data Visualization Dashboard

연구 분야: Infrastructure

학회: BCB '23: Proceedings of the 14th ACM International Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), in almost every month of 2020, more than 1 million people were affected by data breaches at healthcare organizations [1]. This was a 9851% increase from 2019, leading to security exploitations in 560 total healthcare organizations [1]. These violations prevented healthcare workers from providing the necessary care to save millions during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, the impact of these attacks continues to be unknown to the public. To foster discussion around these issues, I developed an interactive data visualization dashboard using R (https://mal-shan.shinyapps.io/healthsecurity/) that would allow patients and healthcare providers to fully understand the magnitude of such incidents. The data for this dashboard is continuously updated from public domain data provided by the DHHS [2]. In addition to showcasing the changing frequency of attacks since 2009, the dashboard also includes an interactive map of the United States that provides population-level statistics on the number of individuals affected by these attacks. Some initial trends that can be determined through the dashboard include the fact that hacking incidents to healthcare providers via network attacks tend to be the most common types of security breaches, leading to the greatest number of affected patients. It is important to note that the DHHS is only required to report attacks in which 500 or more individuals were affected and so there may be underreporting present in the dataset used to create the dashboard. Similarly, although the time series graph on attacks over the years seems to show that 2023 has the least number of attacks and individuals affected, this representation is biased due to the fact that the year is only halfway through and so it is still unknown how many future attacks will occur. However, it is still concerning that there were already more than 6 million individuals that had their healthcare data breached across the first 100 attacks that occurred this year. Hopefully, this dashboard can pave the way for more resources being dedicated to the analysis and prevention of health information security attacks by providing a platform for the public to understand the large-scale and continuous impact of these hacking incidents.