CIO | How Are the Deep Web and Dark Web Affecting Healthcare today?

Healthcare CIOs and leaders must be proactive and aware of the potential danger the Deep Web and Dark Web present.

By Larry Stofko | Did you know that only 4% of the Internet is visible to the general public? Yes, the Clear Web is where we do daily things like check email, Facebook, and Twitter and buy things from Amazon, etc. These are all the web sites and web pages that a search engine like Google can find. The other 96% is made up of the Deep Web, a subset of the Internet that cannot be found by search engines like Google. This includes all web pages that are behind membership logins, all company and organization web pages used internally and other data like medical records, financial records, and academic databases.

Most of the Deep Web does not have anything unlawful on it. However, if you go deeper to the Dark Web, you will find items of an illegal nature, perhaps like what you would find on the black market.

If one can imagine, with healthcare as tangled as it is, there may be those who are willing to take the risk and go to the dark side, and there are surely those unscrupulous types standing by ready to capitalize on the vulnerable and desperate who turn to the strange and unconventional as cures and solutions to their ailments. More...