The blockchain industry is glaring at its teenage years. However, as a nascent technology, threats are everywhere. The healthcare industry, which is leveraging the technology’s potential for horizontal innovation has not been spared either.

Every new year brings forth new things, both good and bad. The health sector, which is getting bolder every day, trying to make the most of blockchain to improve on innovation, will need to watch out a lot more keenly. These top four threats, in particular, should grab the attention of the industry players as they can erode the gains already made.

1. Phishing Will Open the Healthcare Sector to More Threats

According to a survey conducted by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) in 2018, phishing attacks lead as the primary threat in the health sector. The study indicated that about 60% of the respondent agree that email is the compromise point. This threat will probably get worse as time goes by.

Industry practitioners see a surge in credential phishing especially those that target popular email services.

2. The Possibility of Holes in Earlier Versions of Kubernetes

The National Institute of Standards and Technology released an advisory in 2018 in which it warned users to beware of holes emerging on earlier versions of Kubernetes. The warning stated that the versions that preceded v1.10.11, v1.11.5, and v1.12.3 could present vulnerabilities.

In these versions, the advisory noted that mishandling error responses to proxy upgrade requests allowed specific requests to initiate connections to go as far back as the backend servers. The result is these connections can then facilitate arbitrary requests that go up to the backend and that are authenticated by the Kubernetes API, even where such queries are malicious.

While the spotted vulnerabilities were reported early in 2019 and dealt with, their appearance did elicit quite some interest. For a vital container orchestration system of Kubernetes’ caliber, holes in the system could compromise deployment of automating application as well as the scaling and management of the deployed applications.     

3. Hacker will Show a Preference for Malicious Cryptomining

Cryptojacking, the act of attacking multiple computers or devices at once to take advantage of their computing power for undeserved gains is on the rise. Also called malicious cryptomining, this harmful act is targeting the healthcare industry with growing intensity.

In Africa, the Middle East, and Turkey, for instance, malicious cryptomining is edging out ransomware as the leading cyber threat.   

4. Terrible Passwords Continues to Expose Organizations

While most risk factors are new and come about with the changing times, some are as old as the dawn of computing. Weak passwords have been a thorn in the flesh of computing since ages ago. Now, password spray attacks are making the most of these vulnerability and rendering organizations more exposed than never before.

It should not come as a surprise that the two most used passwords are “12345” and “password.” This situation is unfortunate and should not be happening in 2019. Mostly so, because it is common among everyone including data center administrators.