Healthcare Cybersecurity
Security challenges such as ransomware, phishing are the only threats that made to the news, however, there is a lot more under the ‘secure healthcare’ topic. Cyphere helps healthcare organisations with vendor-neutral security services to safeguard critical services and protect confidential customer data.
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Healthcare cybersecurity
Healthcare sector continues to offer life-critical services while improving treatments and patient care with new healthcare technologies. This constant change is always opening new avenues for threat actors, and healthcare organisation must tackle information 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 industry across hostpitals, trusts, care homes and 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?
- Have you considered aligning with healthcare security best practices?
Healthcare cybersecurity challenges
- Safeguarding networks from ransomware
- Reducing growing risk with interconnected medical devices
- Balancing act with legacy systems, secure connectivity and medical device security
- Data breaches prevention and insider attack threats
- Ensuring healthcare security compliance
- Business Email Compromise and Fraud Scams
Key healthcare cyber security questions
- Are there sufficient controls - segregation, logging, monitoring across corporate and production estates?
- How do you process and store confidential healthcare information?
- 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 IT security evaluation before deployment at scale?
Healthcare security services to protect people, processes and technology
Challenges behind secure healthcare
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 in 2018.
We have found that the most common healthcare security challenges include:
- Lack of proactive approach towards information security
- Security challenges of keeping up with modern IT infrastructure
- Continued cybersecurity education
- Defence-in-depth approach to ensure segregation at user, environment and system levels to protect healthcare information
- 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.
In terms of healthcare IT security issues, the following areas amount to the security risks:
- Phishing and ransomware attacks leading up to paralysis of entire hospital networks
- Critical and high-risk vulnerabilities exploited in the remote access products providing connectivity.
- Third-party and supply chain risks through vulnerable configurations in EHR, EMR, MPI software, practica management and other hospital information systems across hospitals and healthcare providers
- Increased use of IoT with insecure practices ranging from manufacturer level design risks to insecure configurations in medical device, systems and implementations
These risks add to practical threats across hospital systems and patient safety.
Healthcare security services
Our experience includes security assessments performed at NHS trusts, start ups, healthcare technology providers including pharmaceutical industry vendors and medical devices vendors to help improve data protection measures.
Healthcare Cybersecurity 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
