Protect Healthcare Data with Strategies for Cybersecurity Resilience

At the moment, the healthcare sector is usually attacked in cyber-attacks because of its highly sensitive nature, which includes financial and medical data. At the same time, as Fierce Healthcare’s report shows, patient records are expensive, as they may cost $250- $1000 on the dark web, as opposed to a credit card number worth $5 and a S********************* worth $1.

Such data hold details of personal and medical marks, including names, addresses, medical history, and insurance information. Cybercriminals extract this data for different purposes, such as identity theft, insurance fraud, or blackmail, which have existed for ages.

Patient record cybersecurity is one of the major concerns of healthcare providers. In this article, we will focus on healthcare data attacks, cybersecurity solutions in healthcare, and how Healthcare cybersecurity companies help with protected health information (PHI).

Also Read: Top IT, Cloud, Cybersecurity News Updates: Weekly Highlights

Why Cybersecurity is Vital in Healthcare?

Healthcare organizations are the bearers of information that people highly trust and are charged with providing healthcare services. They have become the target of unscrupulous individuals who are into malicious deeds. Effective and successful cyber attacks against hospitals have complex consequences, from the leakage of private identification data, being sold ‘dirty’ on the dark web, to disruptions in the process flow that jeopardize patient safety at its core.

From 2015 to 2022, incidents involving medical facilities represented a notable share, 32% of all reported data breaches. Hospitals, as is the case with any breach, experience both reputational and financial harm following such breaches, which makes it difficult to protect critical yet sensitive patient details.

Ransomware, undoubtedly, is among the various cyber risks and dangers healthcare facilities encounter during network operations. These types of cyber warfare, such as ransomware, use error to render critical systems and personal data inaccessible or even switch off some of the internal processes in the organization, and then eventually, the victims are forced to pay the ransom to get their control back again. In September 2023, hospitals were confronted with 18 attacks from ransomware, which is a rather unexpected and grave increase of 86% compared to August’s numbers. An IBM research study revealed a total loss of about $10.89 million from a healthcare institution hack, which was estimated from a statistical survey.

Though financial losses are considered as consequences of data breaches, other repercussions range beyond these overhead costs. There are obviously hospitals that are unsecured in the event of data being unsecured; hence, they lose their image, leading the public to refrain from trusting them for their confidential information. Also, the provider has information on the platforms for a broad audience, which is declining the people’s confidence in the healthcare system. Regulatory consequences, such as fines & penalties, among other things, also result in the already existing damages when a hospital has not prepared enough to resist cybercrimes in their data storage.

The Why Behind  Cyber Criminals Attacking the Healthcare System

The cyber criminals’ choice of targeting the healthcare sector is quite multi-faceted, with the inherent tendency of this sector to provide crucial services and a wealth of information being the two main ones. Any such intrusions in healthcare sovereignties should not grant permission to valuable medical data, which would be used later via ransomware schemes providing financial benefit and reputation through media for attackers.

Several factors make the medical service line more exposed to such assaults.

Firstly, continuously improving digital assistance and dramatic spikes in the number of such infringements create obstacles that rest with the healthcare institutions’ limited resources constraining their ability to manage these evolving risks.

Usually, with the reluctant blend of the old legacy and the new-gen technologies, which do not have someone or any specialized operational procedures to coordinate all of these functions and also lack the documentation, the risks will continue to increase.

The monetization of data collected from IoT and medical devices compounds the doubts for the majority of the patients as these often lack robust security measures.

The complexity is that the cybersecurity skill shortage exacerbates the situation; consequently, most organizations are either skill-wise inadequate or unable to secure their prominent attack surfaces.

Types of Cyber Attacks

According to the “2020: A Retrospective Look at Healthcare Cybersecurity” report from the HHS Office of Information Security, ransomware attacks accounted for almost 50 percent of all healthcare data breaches. Healthcare organizations paid an average of $910,335 to ransomware attackers in 2021, according to BakerHostetler’s 2021 Data Security Incident Response Report.

As for the specific vectors of attack, the 2021 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report shows that 86 percent of reported healthcare breaches were attributed to:

• Errors (including mis-delivery)
• Web application attacks
• System intrusions, including credential theft incidents

Cybersecurity Measures and Regulatory Compliance

Aimed at strengthening the defenses of healthcare organizations and ensuring the protection of vital assets and information, regulatory bodies and industry associations have published compliance mandates and frameworks of guidelines, such as:

General Security and Privacy:

• “Health Industry Cybersecurity Practices: Managing Threats and Protecting Patients” jointly published by HHS and Healthcare and Public Sector Coordinating Councils, provides voluntary, consensus-based guidelines to reduce cyber threats in healthcare.
• HIPAA Security Rule provides national requirements to protect electronic personal health information, requiring compliance with administrative, physical, and technical safeguards to protect ePHI’s confidentiality, integrity, and security.
• NIST’s “HIPAA Security Rule Crosswalk to NIST Cybersecurity Framework” maps HIPAA Security Rule standards to relevant NIST Cybersecurity Framework sub-categories.

Protection Against Ransomware:

• HHS’s “Ransomware Fact Sheet” provides specific advice on ransomware protection and recovery, designed specifically to ensure HIPAA notification requirements are met.
• CISA’s alert, “DarkSide Ransomware: Best Practices for Preventing Business Disruption from Ransomware Attacks,” provides mitigation steps, including multi-factor authentication, spam filters, user training programs, network traffic filtering, software updates, access restrictions, antivirus programs, and execution prevention strategies.

Key Cybersecurity Challenges that Healthcare Sector Faces

Protecting data and systems as cyber threats constantly evolve is daunting for healthcare organizations. Below are some of the major cybersecurity challenges that they face:

• Legacy Systems Vulnerabilities: Legacy computers and medical devices utilize outdated workstations and networked medical equipment whose unpatched vulnerabilities expose healthcare organizations to easy exploitation by the attackers.
• Data Breaches: Healthcare organizations struggle to balance the accessibility of electronic health records with robust security measures to keep large volumes of sensitive data safe from illicit access or breach.
• Unsecured Medical Devices and Equipment: The proliferation of Internet of Medical Things devices brings new security risks, with many of them lacking appropriate security protocols, adding new entry points for attackers.
• Ransomware and Malware: Healthcare organizations rank among the most targeted sectors for ransomware attacks, which put the integrity of data and the continuity of operations at risk, hence forcing the organizations to pay the ransom to recover their services.
• Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS): The attackers use DDoS attacks to paralyze healthcare operations by overwhelming the traffic volumes to incapacitate systems, in some cases using these tactics along with ransomware attacks.
• Phishing: Human vulnerability to these attacks is being widely exploited by the attackers, and phishing remains the most common entry points for them to enter the systems and steal their credentials, deploy malicious software, or activate some other type of malicious code.
• Security Architecture Fragmentation: Healthcare entities often suffer from fragmented security architectures with multiple disparate point products, making effective threat detection and response difficult.
• Budgetary Constraints: The allocation of resources to the cybersecurity initiatives competes for the same resources with the priority of budgetary allocations for healthcare prioritizing the patient’s care, which might result in inappropriate investments in comprehensive security measures and amplify risks and resource inefficiencies.

Top Healthcare Cybersecurity Companies

#1 Crowdstrike

CrowdStrike, an American cybersecurity technology company based in Austin, Texas, protects healthcare systems from cyberattacks. It enables healthcare organizations to focus on delivering the best patient care. The company has redefined modern security with its advanced cloud-native platform for protecting critical areas of enterprise risk.

Benefits that CrowdStrike Offers:

• Low cost to meet budget requirements.The statistics shows that on an average CrowdStrike Customers lowers their IT Security Costs by 30%.
• Unifies vibility, prevention, detection and threat intelligence across devices, servers, desktops, containers and public clouds.

Powerful Solutions for Healthcare:

1. Advanced endpoint protection
2. Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
3. Falcon Discover for Internet of Things (IOT) and Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)
4. Stop active breaches with CrowdStrike® Incident Response

#2 Palo Alto Networks

With Palo Alto Networks healthcare organizations globally resist cyberattacks and safegaurd patient data. This helps the organizations to focus on delivering better outcomes and experiences. The company constantly delivers innovation to allow secure digital transformation and boost pace of change.

Advantages of Palo Alto Networks:

• Enhance Security of Existing Infrastructure
• Automate threat analysis
• Update Deployments for constant patient data protection

#3 Check Point

Check Point is one of the leading companies offering comprehensive cybersecurity solutions for healthcare IoT. Check Point helps organizations prevent IoT-related attacks and constantly minimize. The company prevents or fights attacks in a very easily scalable and non-disruptive way in the medical and healthcare industry processes.

Benefits Check Point offers to the Healthcare companies:

• Increases the level of security.
• Reduces costs by delivering unified threat prevention across networks, cloud, mobile endpoint and IoT.
• Provides comprehensive multi-cloud security and compliance solutions for healthcare.

Check Point offers: 

• Cybersecurity built for Healthcare IoT
• Multi-Cloud Security for Healthcare
• Network Security Advantage

#4 CyberArk

CyberArk is a key security partner for more than half of the Fortune 500 companies. The company supports healthcare providers by developing automation capabilities that fights human error and allow IT operations to laser in on its most critical work. It has a flexible approach which secures privileged access vulnerabilities without disturbing the business.

CyberArk’s Healthcare Solutions :

• Prevent attacks: Strong privileged access and identity security protect against threats across complex integrated care delivery networks.
• Secure customer trust: Build security into virtual care, patient portals, and other digital applications.
• Meet compliance: Ensure strong, documented, auditable privileged access security to demonstrate compliance and avoid penalties.

#5 Trend Micro:

Trend Micro is one the top cloud and enterprise cybersecurity solutions provider. Its solution can help healthcare organizations to enhance security pre, post and at the moment of the attack. The company’s solution provides visibility into cybersecurity risks, using legacy and moderb systems. The platform offers protection, detection and response to overcome cyber incidents and lower alert fatigue for security teams with bare minimum total cost of ownership for security operations.

For optimal protection against contemporary threats, Trend Micro Smart Protection Network employs proactive global threat intelligence mechanisms. This entails:

• Harnessing big-data analytics to analyze data from hundreds of millions of sensors worldwide, processing over 16 billion threat queries daily.
• Demonstrating a capability to identify new threats fifty times faster than the industry average, as per recent evaluations by NSS Labs.
• Effectively thwarting 1 billion ransomware attacks and detecting 500,000 new threats daily.

Final Note

Healthcare cybersecurity threats materialize in myriad ways and target a wide swath of systems. As such, healthcare organizations need to devise a full cybersecurity strategy, one that covers all their assets. This would entail securing all conventional IT systems, Internet of Medical Things devices, legacy systems that are not supported, connected facilities devices, and so forth from all forms of attacks, risks, and threats.

It also becomes imperative that organizations maintain comprehensive visibility throughout their entire infrastructure and prioritize them based on their risk profile. Adherence to specific regulatory mandates is equally important, which invariably would mean the implementation of requisite protections for reaching compliance.

FAQs

1. What Does Cybersecurity Entail in Healthcare?

Cybersecurity in healthcare pertains to safeguarding sensitive medical data, healthcare systems, and digital infrastructure from unauthorized access, data breaches, and various cyber threats. This comprehensive approach encompasses establishing robust policies, procedures, technologies, and practices aimed at protecting patient data, preserving the integrity of healthcare operations, and guaranteeing the confidentiality and availability of critical systems.

2. How Does HIPAA Relate to Cybersecurity?

HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) intersects with cybersecurity by establishing crucial safeguards and guidelines to protect the privacy and security of individuals’ health information. HIPAA’s Security Rule mandates that healthcare organizations and their business associates implement various technical, administrative, and physical measures to safeguard electronic protected health information (ePHI) from unauthorized access, breaches, and cyber threats. Compliance with HIPAA ensures that healthcare entities prioritize cybersecurity practices, including encryption, access controls, employee training, risk assessments, and incident response plans, thereby maintaining the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive health data.

3. What are the best practices of cybersecurity in healthcare? 

1. Risk Assessments: Risk assessments are fundamental to cybersecurity programs in healthcare. Assessing risk is essential before taking any action to manage it effectively. Factors such as the probability of occurrence, impact on the organization, and risk prioritization must be considered. Regular risk assessments should be conducted or reviewed, ideally at least once annually.
2. Security Controls: Healthcare organizations ideally implement both basic and advanced security controls to ensure defense-in-depth. This strategy ensures that if one control fails, another can mitigate the risk. For instance, while a virus may breach a firewall, it may be intercepted by an anti-virus program. However, not all incidents can be prevented. Robust incident response plans are crucial to swiftly address and mitigate security incidents.

4. What are the healthcare laws and regulations on cybersecurity?

1. HIPAA Privacy Rule, 45 CFR Part 160 and Subparts A and E of Part 164
2. HIPAA Security Rule, 45 CFR Parts 160 and 164, Subparts A and C
3. HIPAA Breach Notification Rule, 45 CFR 164.400-414
4. DrKumo Cybersecurity Framework

5. Who are the healthcare stakeholders?

Organizational Members:

Staff are important stakeholders in healthcare cybersecurity. Regular security awareness training will ensure that they are aware of what the risks are and how to react in the event of a security incident. Staff are also the frontline observers for the cybersecurity team and will offer valuable information about the system’s operation and any potential vulnerabilities.

Patients:
Patients need to understand how to communicate with their healthcare provider securely, especially when using telehealth platforms or other secure messaging. They should be aware of the organization’s privacy and security policies to protect their personal information.

Vendors/Suppliers:

Many healthcare organizations engage vendors or suppliers to provide various healthcare programs or systems. Lack of awareness by vendors regarding healthcare security policies can create significant risks to the cybersecurity of the organization.

[To share your insights with us as part of editorial or sponsored content, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]