CYBER SECURITY IN HEALTHCARE
Security challenges such as ransomware, phishing are the only threats that made to the news. We provide vendor neutral specialist healthcare security assessments to safeguard critical services and protect confidential customer data.
Get In Touch
We will not share your details with third parties.
Cyber security in healthcare
Healthcare sector continues to offer life-critical services while improving treatments and patient care with new technologies. This constant change is always opening new avenues for threat actors, and healthcare organisation must tackle cyber security concerns head on.
It’s no more teengars in their bedrooms tring to hack into systems. There is this whole underground economy backed by Organised crime groups targeting healthcare organisations. This worrying trend is backed up by some of the incidents in past a few years. On 12th May 2017, NHS was brought to a standstill for several days due to WannaCry Outbreak. There has been 150% increase in cyber attacks amid Covid-19 crisis.
Healthcare organisations need to be ready for bigger questions such as:
- ‘Should you pay the ransom?‘ in case of ransomware attacks
- Have we taken sufficient measures in securing both remote workers and remote infrastructure exposed on the internet?
- Have we reviewed our insider threat mitigation strategy?
Do these security challenges sound familiar?
- Safeguarding networks from ransomware
- Reducing growing risk with interconnected devices
- Balancing act with legacy systems
- Data breaches and Insider threat attacks
- Ensuring compliance
- Business Email Compromise and Fraud Scams
The DSP (Data Security and Protection) Toolkit
The Data Security and Protection (DSP) Toolkit is an online self-assessment tool that allows NHS organisations (that access patient data) to benchmark against 10 data security standards set by National Data Guardian. DSP toolkit replaced the IG toolkit back in 2018.
We have found that the most common challenges across the healthcare sector include:
- Lack of proactive approach towards cyber security
- Security challenges of keeping up with modern IT infrastructure
- Continued cyber security education
- Defense in depth approach to ensure segregation at user, environment and system levels
- NHS backend and production networks could act as a bridge due to shared backend infrastructure, misconfiguration flaws or vulnerabilities in the network
- Lack of strict processes designed to identify vulnerability, uncover suspicious behaviour and respond to malicious activities.
Wealth of experience, skill-set and outcome focussed approach.
What are your key security questions?
- Are there sufficient controls - segregation, logging, monitoring across corporate and production estates?
- How do you process and store confidential patient data?
- Are you making the most of NHS DSP Toolkit?
- How are you managing the risk of unsupported systems?
- What systems are in place to tackle insider threats?
- Are you performing independent technical evaluation before deployment at scale?
Healthcare Sector Experience
This section refers to specific projects’ based experience in this sector. This includes assessments performed at NHS trusts, healthcare providers including pharmaceutical industry vendors.
Key Projects
- Internal infrastructure pen testing involving password reviews, patching, auditing, logging, device hardening and active directory security assessments
- Both Internet and Intranet Web Applications – Hospital Staff portals, Admin Portals, Patient information portals
- Web Application Security Assessments (Staff and Student Portals)
- Corporate and Hospital Network Access Control Reviews
- Password cracking & analysis
- Security product configuration and implementation reviews
Need advice or help from our friendly team?
Recent Blog Entries
Penetration testing methodologies, frameworks & tools
Read about penetration testing methodologies and their usage, frameworks and pen testing tools. Discover how different types of tests impact efficiency.
How to perform a cyber security risk assessment? Step by step guide.
Learn how to perform a cyber security risk assessment with step by step approach. It includes important aspects such as risk management and data audit.
Host-based Intrusion Detection System – Overview and HIDS vs NIDS
Understand what is HIDS, how is it different from NIDS and advantages and disadvantages. Learn about the attack vectors identified by each of the technologies.
Role of security in SaaS | SaaS Security Checklist
Read around the main cloud security risks, improving security in SaaS applications. Find our Saas security checklist to protect against the cyber attacks.
What does a penetration testing report look like?
Read about how penetration testing report can affect your investments, helps to validate your controls and security strategy. Read more for tips and samples.
Sensitive Data and Examples | GDPR Personal Data
Read about examples of sensitive data, what is sensitive data and how GDPR personal data can be identified and protected. Discover more.
What is PCI Compliance? Requirements, Maintenance and Fines
Learn what is PCI Compliance, it’s functional goals and 12 requirements. How to maintain compliance and ensure customer data security. Discover more.
What is Access Control? Key data security component
Learn about access control , their types and examples, and how to use it to secure sensitive data. Discover more.
Penetration Testing vs Vulnerability Scanning
Read about penetration testing vs vulnerability scanning and confusions around terminology. This article explores differences, decision factors and the right choice at various stages of a business.
When and How to report GDPR personal data breaches (Article 33)
What to do in case of a data protection breach for GDPR compliance, How long you have and How and What to report – everything you want to know. Discover more.