Analysis of Insider Threats in the Healthcare Industry: A Text Mining Approach

Abstract

To address rapidly growing data breach incidents effectively, healthcare providers need to identify various insider and outsider threats, analyze the vulnerabilities of their internal security systems, and develop more appropriate data security measures against the threats. While there have been studies on trends of data breach incidents, there is a lack of research on the analysis of descriptive contents posted on the data breach reporting website of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Hence, this study develops a novel approach to the analysis of descriptive data breach information with the use of text mining and visualization. Insider threats, vulnerabilities, breach incidents, impacts, and responses to the breaches are analyzed for three data breach types.