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.
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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
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