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Should you Trust the Zero Trust Security Model?
Healthcare

Should you Trust the Zero Trust Security Model?

by Editor

The Cybersecurity threat landscape in healthcare has evolved so rapidly that it has become difficult to trust anyone in your network infrastructure. Who can you put your trust in when it comes to your IT infrastructure? The answer is no in a Zero Trust paradigm. The network access control paradigm underpins this trust concept. It means that users should only be permitted access to a network or device once they have been verified and only to the degree necessary to complete a task.

In this article, we’ll have explored the benefits and risks associated with the zero-trust security model. Let’s get started.

What is Zero Trust Model in a Nutshell?

Zero Trust is a network defensive shift toward a more comprehensive IT security architecture for all industries, including healthcare. It allows enterprises to restrict access restrictions to networks, applications, and the environment without sacrificing performance or the user experience. In other words, a Zero Trust strategy places no trust in anyone. Security teams are finding it increasingly difficult to trust or identify who should be authorized or trusted with access to their networks as more firms undertake more computing outside their perimeter in the cloud. As a result, an increasing number of businesses are incorporating Zero Trust into their trust network architecture and enterprise security strategy.

A three-step method is used in the Zero Trust security model.

  • Verify a user’s identity via authentication
  • Implement device and network access control
  • Limit privileged access.

This paradigm promotes the idea that businesses should not trust people or entities outside their network perimeters.

Zero Trust Use Cases

The Zero Trust model has increasingly been formalized as a response to secure digital transformation and a variety of complex, devastating threats seen in past years. The Zero Trust security paradigm can help healthcare organizations be more secure.

You must establish an infrastructure deployment model, which includes

  • Hybrid, multi-cloud multi-identity
  • Legacy systems
  • Unmanaged devices
  • Software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications

It is essential to address use cases with critical threats, such as:

  • Supply chain attacks_ generally involve privileged users working remotely and unmanaged devices.
  • Ransomware_ a two-part problem, including identity compromise and code execution.
  • Insider Threats_ extremely challenging while users are working remotely.

Here are some considerations an organization have

  • User experience impact considerations, especially while using multi-factor authentication (MFA).
  • SOC/analyst expertise challenges.
  • Industry or compliance requirements

Each enterprise has distinct problems because of the type of business, current security strategy, and digital transformation maturity. If appropriately implemented, zero trust can adjust to meet specific requirements and ensure a return on investment (ROI) on your security strategy.

What are the benefits of the Zero Trust Security Model?

Let’s outline the main benefits of the Zero Trust security model.

  • This method necessitates the regulation and classification of all network resources. It allows organizations to see who has access to resources and for what reasons, and what security measures need to be put in place to protect those resources.
  • Implementing a Zero Trust security model is associated with deploying solutions for continuous monitoring and logging off user activity and asset states. It enables businesses to discover possible hazards quickly and respond appropriately.
  • This model helps expand security protection across multiple containerized and computing environments, independent of the underlying infrastructure.
  • It prevents data breaches and has lateral movements using application micro-segmentation.
  • A zero trust model ensures organizational security while providing a consistent user experience.

What are some technical challenges in implementing the Zero Trust Security model?

Here are the most common technical challenges faced by users/organizations while implementing a Zero Trust security model.

1. Network Trust and Malware

Without the complexity associated with traditional systems, organizations must ensure that any device and user may safely connect to the internet regardless of location. They must also be proactive in detecting, blocking, and reducing specific threats like phishing, malware, ransomware, advanced zero-day attacks, and DNS data exfiltration. The Zero Trust security paradigm can help your company improve its security while lowering the danger of a cyberattack.

2. IT Resources and Complexity

Security and enterprise access are complicated and ever-changing. Traditional corporate technologies are complex, and changing them takes time and resources. A Zero Trust security approach can help you save time and money by reducing the amount of work you have to do.

3. Secure data and application access
Traditional access tools and technologies, such as VPN, are based on trust principles, leading to compromised user passwords and data breaches. To ensure that their business is secure while allowing easy access for all users, organizations must reconsider their access strategy and technologies. While offering a uniform and efficient user experience, the Zero Trust security architecture decreases complexity and risk.

Choose the right Zero Trust Model?

We’ve gone over some of the advantages and drawbacks of the Zero Trust paradigm in this article. The benefits of putting this architecture in place go far beyond security. The healthcare industry being the prime target for hackers shifting to Zero Trust Security is not an option but a need. However, there are still significant dangers and obstacles with this strategy. Changes in the threat landscape may prompt businesses to adopt a Zero Trust security architecture for network access control and identity management. These businesses should understand all the problems and hazards associated with this security paradigm.

Security and IT teams of all organizations must concentrate on business considerations while creating a zero-trust architecture: What are we attempting to safeguard? Who did you get it from? It’s critical to understand that the entire security system is built on a zero-trust architecture. The strategy is stacked on top of the technologies and procedures, not the other way around.

As Protected Harbor proposes in its zero-trust network access methodology, zero trust can be supplied as a service. You can take a phased approach before deploying zero trust more broadly, starting with your most essential assets or a test case of non-critical assets. Whatever your starting position, a best-in-class zero-trust solution will provide you with immediate risk reduction and security management. Protected Harbor not only deploys the Zero Trust Security but a host of features such as remote monitoring 24×7, 99.99% uptime, malware protection, etc., to deliver unmatched experience and satisfaction. Click here to know how we do it.

network
Technology

The cloud demands network observability. But why?

by Editor

Why Network Observability is in Demand During the Era of IoT and Cloud in Healthcare IT?

Implementing dynamic networking infrastructure has become more critical than ever to securely connect with people, devices, applications, and data to support our evolving working environment. What can be the first thing we need to consider for this challenge? We cannot control or secure all kinds of connectivity if we don’t see what is happening in our network. By default, networks are distributed systems, and network visibility is vital in distributed systems. However, can network monitoring be good enough to better network visibility in the Cloud and IoT era? If not, what can be the solution?

The phrase “observability” is becoming more prevalent in the workplace technology field, but it’s perhaps even more significant in healthcare environments, where hospitals and healthcare providers can’t afford downtime.

– Richard Luna, CEO, Protected Harbor

This article will find the best way to gain network visibility by leveraging network observability rather than network monitoring. Let’s get started.

Why is network observability demanded in healthcare?

The healthcare industry is undergoing a massive transformation. This is primarily driven by the changing healthcare economy, but also by advances in information technology. Two of the biggest drivers are the move to mobile devices and the evolution to cloud services.

Both trends are impacting how hospitals need to manage and secure their networks. More and more hospitals are deploying mobile access points, which gives doctors and staff the ability to treat patients anywhere, anytime. And more and more hospitals are moving their IT infrastructure to the cloud.

These trends have implications on how hospitals and health systems can monitor and troubleshoot their networks. The traditional method of monitoring and troubleshooting — TCP dump — is not designed for cloud or wireless networks. It requires too much time, too many resources, and it’s not very accurate.

That’s why network observability is needed in healthcare IT today, especially as more healthcare moves to IoT (mobile devices) and the cloud.

What is network monitoring?

Monitoring is a passive data collection and surveillance practice used to measure the performance against pre-set standards. Monitoring equipment has been deployed over the years depending on more static, traditional network environments without frequent changes. However, these tools can be deployed throughout the corporate network in various ways.

It offers a centralized view of the operational health of the underlying network and infrastructure. Network monitoring might give alerts based on connectivity, downtime, or service degradation but does not give deeper cause or hypothetical exploration of unknowns provided by an observability platform.

What is network observability?

Observability, according to Gartner, is the progression of monitoring into a process that provides insight into digital business applications, accelerates innovation, and improves customer experience. So we should use observability to extend current monitoring capabilities. Network observability is a process intended to have a deep knowledge of network health to provide an optimal end-user experience. When teams observe networks deeply, they understand ways to solve problems, correct them, and improve network performance to prevent future errors. Here are the main differences:

Network Observability Network Monitoring
● It focuses on network health from the standpoint of the end-user.

● Reduce administrator time to detect root cause and remediation

● Applies a broader range of information to pinpoint the leading cause

● provide service assurance to guarantee quality services

● uses next-generation AI and streaming telemetry

 ● less focused on network health

● NetOps staff handle alerts manually

● Monitors deviations and baselines traffic

● Uses proven protocols and tools

Network observability uses metrics, logs, and traces to give visibility into systems and enables you to monitor your cloud resources. It helps determine the complex IT infrastructures as enterprises require more visibility across their rapidly evolving application landscapes.

The current challenges with network monitoring

The rapid shift towards cloud technology and related trends, such as SD-WAN, has changed the concept of network monitoring. Still, the traditional network performance monitoring tools are not keeping up with advanced networking technologies. Here are some issues regarding conventional network performance monitoring tools.

  • Metadata, routing policy, network security, and cloud orchestration information are not included in traditional Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) products.
  • Basic network connectivity info such as IP/MAC and port numbers are insufficient to analyze network traffic securely.
  • The tools can’t handle cloud scalability, as cloud customers produce terabytes of VPC flow logs every month. So Typical network packet sniffer solutions do not work in the cloud environment.

Conclusion

More and more Healthcare IT is moving to IoT (mobile devices) and the cloud. We have already talked a lot about securing your wireless network. But Network Observability is needed.

Network Observability is a solution that gives you the visibility you need to see what’s happening on your network and how it’s impacting users, applications, and services. It is that simple! What does that mean for healthcare IT? We need to know what our security posture looks like at all times. We also need to know if our employees are using these services correctly or if their policies are affecting patient care or our security posture in any way.

In this case, we are looking at securing and protecting ourselves from cybersecurity threats. What network observability does is give us the visibility we need to see what’s happening on our network and how it’s impacting users, applications, and services. And that means having the right tools in place to respond quickly when something goes wrong or needs attention if your organization is looking for a wholly secured solution partner with one of the leading healthcare security services providers such as Protected Harbor.

The Learning? Using Network Observability, businesses will get a complete picture of their networks, systems, applications, and infrastructure layers. With Protected Harbor, your company will be able to shift from a reactive to a proactive mindset, anticipating any disruptive outages or slowdowns before they happen, minimizing the impact on facilities and necessary healthcare interfaces. After all, 24/7 care is only possible if the fundamental technology on which modern healthcare is built continues to run smoothly, and observability will assist many organizations in doing just that. Get in touch with us today.

Top 5 ways for large hospitals to secure their data
CybersecurityData Breach

Top 5 ways for large hospitals to secure their data

by Editor

In recent years, data protection has become essential for all organizations, regardless of their size. Whether it’s occurring on the newest start-ups on the block or at a large healthcare corporation, data breaches and web theft can cause massive disruptions to organizations’ day-to-day operations. Large hospitals, in many cases, are way ahead of the game. Without having proper security procedures and policies in place, they can leave themselves open to potential risks and consequences of cyberattacks.

No matter how damaging a threat to a business’s data security, it can be easily avoidable with appropriate safeguards. If you want to ensure business continuity and ensure health information and patients’ security, you have to invest in the proper methods. This article will see how large hospitals secure their data and ensure corporate data security.

Data Security Methods For Large Hospitals

Many large hospitals are already using rigorous security methods. Since they learn and grow from the mistakes of other organizations, large entities tend to have proactive security policies and robust threat monitoring techniques in place. Here are five methods that large hospitals and healthcare companies look to redesign their data security methods.

Understand data lifecycle

Large hospitals with proactive security policies know their data, how it is used and where it is stored. Mapping data flow lets organizations better evaluate their weak points. Moreover, large organizations use discovery tools to ensure that data is accessible by authorized devices and users only. These capabilities enable large hospitals to be GDPR compliant and fulfill other transparency/privacy standards.

Use of encryption across the boards

Large hospitals not only handle a bulk of data but a variety of data. The heterogeneous pool of data makes them vulnerable to cyber-attacks. They use encryption methods for systems, data in the cloud, data at rest, and data in transit to protect their data. Hard drives, USB devices, and phones should use encryption if holding sensitive data.

Here are a few recommendations for data encryption.

  • Look at data in all cases, both in transit and at rest. Encryption is used to protect data in all scenarios.
  • Back up all the files and create an image backup before encryption. Create a boot disk or removable media and ensure that you have installed media for the operating system.
  • Decentralize encryption and decryption. You need an encryption key manager to maintain the security of keys to keep things organized while using a decentralized method. You will want to encrypt databases, applications, and files. Using distributed encryption, your organization can yield many benefits, including more robust performance, better availability, low network bandwidth, and high-quality data transmission.
  • Use the hub-spoke model to encrypt data. While combining the distributed execution with the central key management, the encryption and decryption mode will be anywhere within your network. The key management can integrate with encryption software and deploy on more than a single node. You can encrypt and decrypt at the node level with all the spokes in place. By structuring this way, data does not need to travel much. You can also maintain higher uptime that can arise from a hub failure. The key manager should be created, store, and monitor the expiration date of the keys used by the spokes. Keys need to be changed within the nodes when they expire.

Protecting data in the cloud

Cloud computing has become an integral aspect of digitalization, but it also increases security vulnerabilities with it. Security concerns have spurred intense disputes in information security circles and CIOs as data migrates to the cloud. Large hospitals do not have control over cloud security, but Cloud Service Providers do. IT departments are concerned; therefore, they use cloud security technologies to encrypt data before uploading it to the cloud, rank data by risk level, protect and monitor end-points, and give enterprises more control over cloud data security.

Here is a list of the best cloud security tools:

  • CloudStrike Falcon_ It’s a next-gen cloud-based endpoint protection solution that takes care of any connected device, ranging from light with a tiny digital footprint to powerful enough to handle attacks like shell injections and zero-day exploits.
  • Cloudflare Web Application Firewall_ It’s a powerful online protection service that can keep millions of web applications safe and connected effectively. It also protects the network by acting as a reverse proxy, preventing DDoS attacks.
  • Barracuda CloudGen Firewall_ It’s a next-gen SaaS security system to protect complex distributed network architectures. This tool identifies and protects against phishing emails and also offers backup.
  • TOPIA_ It’s a cloud security tool that gathers data on assets and analyzes it to detect threats and rank them based on their severity. It applies in-memory protection and Patchless Protection to defend a network.
  • Zerospam_ This cloud security tool protects corporate email servers by fighting against cyber threats like spear-phishing and ransomware. It’s an easy-to-use, highly effective tool with performance enhancement capabilities.

Technologies for data security

While technologies to protect data are constantly improving, they still fall short in several critical areas. Companies’ deal with security data has changed rapidly since introducing HIPAA compliance in 1996. We have come a long way, but we also have a very long way to go.

Large hospitals use a variety of methods and techniques to minimize security threats. While several tools focus on external threats, log-in records and authentication tools help monitor internal threats. Below are standard technologies and policies large hospitals use for data security.

  • Data masking- Data masking is a method to develop a fake yet realistic version of your company data. Data masking aims to protect sensitive data and provide a functional alternative when accurate data is not needed, such as sales demos, user training, or software testing. Data masking processes alter the data values while using the same format. The aim is to create a version that can not be reverse-engineered or deciphered. There are various ways to alter data, including encryption, word or character substitution, and character shuffling.
  • Data backups- To ensure accessibility, it is recommended to keep data backed up. Backing up data includes files and databases in addition to configurations, systems, and applications. Implementing storage backups minimizes the effect of ransomware or other malicious attacks.
  • Data erasure- Erase the data that is not necessary. Delete data if a customer cancels an account. Moreover, erase information if a customer does not want to be on an email list.
  • Tokenization is a way to protect data at rest while preserving data length and type. Tokenization replaces sensitive data with non-sensitive, randomly generated substitute characters as placeholder data. These characters, known as tokens, have no intrinsic value. They allow authorized users to get sensitive data when needed. It isn’t easy to maintain performance and scale securely as databases increase in size. Moreover, it’s difficult to exchange data as it requires direct access to a token vault mapping the token values. Tokenization is mainly used for structured data fields, such as social security numbers or payment cards.
  • Authentication- can vary from two to multi-factor authentication (2FA-MFA) and sometimes involves physical keys. The purpose of multi-factor authentication (MFA) is to construct a layered defense that makes it more difficult for an unauthorized person to get access to a target, such as a physical location, computing device, network, or database. Even if one element is hacked or broken, the attacker still has one or more barriers to overcome before gaining access to the target.

Conclusion

As hospitals and healthcare organizations plan for the future, they identify security as a prime directive. But there is a lot that can be done to consolidate and move towards distributed architectures without sacrificing data integrity and compliance. Privacy by Design/Default is one concept that would certainly help. For example, when you look at data reported as lost, compromised, or stolen, most of these incidents are related to human error.

And while technology can reduce some of the human mistakes that lead to breaches, ultimately, it will be up to the organization to enforce strict policies regarding security and the management of sensitive data. If an organization treats its data as if it were its own, then there is no reason that it would get into the wrong hands or leak out in any harmful way.

In summary, the future of health data security depends on a combination of creative solutions and technology to maintain privacy while still giving individuals access to their information.

Any strategy must also be adaptable and responsive to changes as they occur. Protected Harbor focuses on additional hardware, servers, modified servers, changes in connection and operations, and can all be part of the plan. And to add, we have our expert team of engineers who are proactive and committed to satisfying the clients.

Deployed monitoring is layered in as part of the plan. We add our Application Outage Avoidance (AOA) technology as monitoring is introduced. The integration of network device data and planned operations are referred to as AOA. For example, if a server’s disk capacity runs short, a sequence is run to enlarge the disk, avoiding a service downtime.

If you want to protect your hospital’s data and remain in compliance with the HIPAA Privacy Rule, there is plenty you can do to keep that data safe. Whether you choose to partner with a HIPAA compliant hosting company such as Protected Harbor or go the do-it-yourself route, plenty of strategies are available to secure your organization’s information.

 

CybersecurityTechnology

Top ways to minimize the risks of IT system attacks.

by Editor

What Can HealthCare IT Do To Minimize Security Threats to IT Systems and Networks?

Healthcare organizations have always been vulnerable to different types of cyber threats. The recent reports by the Department of Health and Human Services highlight that healthcare is facing more severe security threats. To make IT systems more secure, organizations need to have a proper defensive approach to minimize data security threats, particularly ransomware attacks. The key to implementing such defensive measures is understanding the potential cyber threats. The data includes the patients’ information in Electronic Health Records (EHR) or electronic journals. The patient’s information is the most sensitive piece of data a Healthcare organization holds. The more sensitive information an organization has, the more it’s crucial to secure the data, as the attackers and hackers can get loads of data by breaching a single system.

In addition to data theft, the other security threats that Healthcare IT (HCIT) face includes:

  • Ransomware
  • Denial of Service
  • Phishing

Although Healthcare Organizations nowadays use technology to make their systems as secure as possible, they still need to take some measures to minimize these security threats to their IT systems and Networks.

By using the guide given in this article, you can prevent your system from Healthcare Data Breach:

Use Two-Factor Authentication:

Two-factor authentication(2FA), also known as multi-factor authentication (MFA), is used by most companies to validate who accesses their system. It requires users to verify their identity by using only authenticated users’ information. Implementing two-factor authentication in a healthcare IT system is essential to comply with HIPAA laws and protect patients’, employees’, and other organizational data. Furthermore, it helps secure the system by ensuring that only authenticated and verified users access the system at any given time.

The healthcare organization can implement the two-factor authentication either by developing their system or integrating a pre-built tool such as:

  • Duo Security
  • Google Authenticator
  • Last-Pass
  • One-Login

Move to a virtual server:

A server that shares the hardware and software resources with other operating systems is called a virtual server. You can re-create the functionality of a physical server through a virtual server. Multiple virtual servers can be set on a single physical server. They help in better resource allocation and utilization and allow for hardware independence, mobility/failover, and advanced disaster recovery. By moving to a virtual server, healthcare organizations can control who accesses their data, information, networks, and systems and improve resiliency and uptime.

Moving to a virtual server is essential as it has so many benefits that address the security concerns that a healthcare organization faces. These benefits include getting the ability to prioritize the critical traffic and improving the network agility while reducing the burden from the IT department.

A healthcare organization can move to a virtual server by using any industry-standard hypervisor (virtualization software), such as:

  • VMWare
  • Microsoft Hyper-V
  • SolarWinds Virtualization Manager
  • V2 Cloud
  • Parallels Desktop
  • Oracle VM Virtual Box

Use Effective EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response Tools):

The Endpoint Detection and Response Tools (EDR) is the technology that alerts the security teams regarding any malicious activity or security threat. They enable fast investigation and containment of attacks at endpoints (an employee’s workstation, a cloud system, a server, mobile or IoT device).

Using Effective EDR tools can help you improve the security of your network by aggregating data on endpoints, including process execution, endpoint communication, and user logins. It is vital to use practical EDR tools to detect and respond to any suspicious activities as soon as they are performed.

Here is a list of the best EDR tools:

  • FireEye
  • Symantec
  • RSA
  • CrowdStrike
  • Cybereason
  • Cynet Security
  • System Center Configuration Manager Endpoint Protection

Understand Your Network Map:

A network map visualizes the devices on a network, their inter-relationship, and transport layers that provide the network services. It can be considered a tool that provides the network users, administrators, managers, and IT professionals an understanding of network layout and performance.

Understanding the network map is critical to comply with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) laws as it provides an overview of devices and data on your network. This overview is crucial in identifying and minimizing the attack surface of a system. It will also uncover devices that IT staff may not know are there- for instance, an old, decommissioned server.

To monitor your network map, you can use tools that help you understand the interconnectivity of devices and data flow through the network. Understanding the data flow can help pinpoint what information is vulnerable to attack and how. Here is a list of tools specifically developed for this purpose:

  • SolarWinds Network Topology Mapper (NTM)
  • Edraw Max
  • Paessler PRTG Network Monitor
  • Nagios
  • ManageEngine OP Manager
  • Lucid Chart and so on.

Update All Software:

Different Healthcare organizations use multiple software throughout the organization to perform various tasks. Different versions of the software are released from time to time to reduce the weaknesses and other loopholes in the previous versions.

Keeping all the software up to date is essential for the better performance of the software. It also helps discourage potential cyber criminals who take advantage of previously-found weaknesses in software.

Whenever a new version of the software is released, the software developers inform all users regarding the updates. The IT admins should update all the software and operating systems throughout the organization from time to time to keep their IT system and network security.

Improve Your VPN Encryption:

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) helps you establish the private network while using the public networks. You can encrypt your internet connection and hide your online identity using a VPN. VPN encryption is a process by which a VPN hides your data when it enters and passes through its tunnels.

Being a healthcare organization, hiding your network details is essential as much critical data is being sent and received over your network. When using a VPN, you can stop attackers from getting any information regarding your network even if they already monitor it.

You can use and improve your VPN Encryption by:

  • Using IPSec Protocols
  • Using the most robust encryption and hashing algorithms and key groups (AES256, SHA256, DH14)
  • Stopping DNS Leaks
  • Using a Kill Switch
  • Using a Network Lock
  • Stopping IPV6 Leaks
  • Limiting VPN Access

Conduct Regular Audits:

Auditing is a process of examining how well a healthcare organization’s system conforms to an established set of security criteria. It includes assessing the security of the system’s physical configuration, information handling processes, user practices, and software.

Conducting regular audits is vital to identify security problems and system weaknesses, establish a security baseline to compare the future audits, comply with internal and external security policies, and identify unnecessary resources. It also helps ensure that any information is being added or updated in the system by an authenticated user, and no one can access the system without verifying their identity.

While performing an audit, system administrators should ensure that the system uses two-step authentication, all users use a strong password, and change it at regular intervals. They should also evaluate the access credentials to ensure that the previous employees do not access the data.

Install Remote Wiping and Disabling on all Mobile Medical Devices:

Remote wiping and disabling is a way to remotely remove or lock the data and user accounts from a mobile device if it is misplaced or stolen. Having remote access to your devices is a significant security feature that helps you control your device remotely.

It is essential that healthcare organizations install remote wiping and disabling on all mobile medical devices to remove their data and accounts if it ever gets stolen or lost. Remote wiping and disabling is a security function that allows you to remotely erase the data on the device or lock the device, even when the device is lost or stolen. You can destroy data stored on your lost or stolen mobile device if you enable the remote wipe feature on your device.

Nowadays, most devices have in-built remote wiping and disabling features that the authorized user can easily enable. But, if a device does not have it, any remote wiping and the disabling tool could easily be installed on the device.

Isolated Backups and Validate the Backup:

A backup that is stored separately from other backups and is inaccessible from the end-user layer is called a remote backup. Creating an isolated backup helps reduce security breaches, especially ransomware attacks. Ransomware is an attack that quickly encrypts all files on a hard drive and starts attacking other devices connected to a network. Creating local backups is not enough to prevent the system and network from this attack, so isolated backups are the best choice. An organization can quickly recover all its data if it has a remote backup.

A remote backup can be created by moving a backup on remote servers and an isolated network that can be accessed occasionally. Once created, it should be validated from time to time to keep it updated.

Use Professional Services:

Although healthcare organizations have many options to increase their system and network security and manage the potential threats, it does not meet the level of expertise required to mitigate these threats. Using a professional service is important as you cannot handle all types of threats yourself. You, at some point, will need to seek professional help to tackle the security breaches, so it is better to assign the task of managing the system security to an external agency. This way, you will no longer have to worry about data and network security, and your team will be able to focus on medical-related tasks.

There are so many professional services available to help you protect your data and network, such as:

  • DataNetworks
  • Keyavi Data
  • Digital Guardian
  • Protected Harbor

Protected Harbor data center is the best solution to tackle most of your healthcare organization’s information system and network issues.

Protected Harbor offers you:

  • Enhanced Security
  • Quick Access Anytime
  • Reduced Downtime
  • Work in Realtime
  • 99% uptime

Healthcare IT professionals must take action now to minimize security threats. Protected Harbor helps healthcare IT professionals protect data and applications, increase uptime, and reduce costs.  So, why compromise your data security to save some money? Contact us today to learn more about how you can secure your healthcare data.

Data Breach

Healthcare data breaches: Insights and Implications.

by Editor

Introduction

From the year 2005 to 2019, the number of individuals affected by healthcare data breaches was 249.09 million. Out of which, 157.40 million individuals were affected from 2014 to 2019. Similarly, in 2020, over 34 million individuals were affected, followed by 45 million in 2021 alone. According to The Office for Civil Rights Department of Health and Human Services)

Due to advancements in IoT, smart devices, and information systems, healthcare systems have become computer-based. All the data and records are managed via computers and are stored in local or remote servers. These technologies have helped healthcare move from a paper-based system to Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. The EHR systems got much popularity in less time as they are cost-effective, fast, and better than many healthcare organizations adopting them.

E-health data is highly receptive, targeted most frequently by attackers. A long-term analysis of data breaches showed that healthcare records were exposed by internal and external attacks, such as hacking, theft/loss, unauthentic internal disclosure, and the improper disposal of unnecessary but sensitive data.

This article will aim at sharing insights on healthcare data breaches and the implications that these incidents can have on organizations that suffer from them. It will also serve as a guide for healthcare organizations to prevent or mitigate the impact of such occurrences.

Why is Healthcare Industry a Primary Target of Cyber-attacks?

The biggest reason the healthcare industry is the primary target of cyber-attacks is that the attackers get worth millions of dollars of data in a single breach. Healthcare is a $1.2 trillion industry. The hospitals and clinics have enough financial resources to pay the ransomware in the private sector. Whereas in the public sector, the situation is the opposite.

Another reason is the reliance of hospitals and clinics on outdated systems with minimal resilience to cyberattacks. On the other hand, the organizations using modern healthcare facilities are still vulnerable to security breaches even though they use electronic data sharing and virtual services to facilitate patients.

Furthermore, the healthcare industry is more prone to cyber-attacks due to its slow adoption of cybersecurity technologies and measures. According to IBM’s survey, only 23% of hospitals have deployed security automation tools. Only 6% or less IT budget in healthcare organizations is dedicated to cybersecurity, according to the HIMSS survey.

Healthcare data insights show that the number of individuals affected from 2015 to 2021 was three hundred twenty-eight million and ninety thousand. You can easily determine how much data could be stolen in a single data breach from this number.

Moreover, according to Black Book Market research, more than 93% of healthcare organizations faced data breaches in the past three years, and 57% had more than 5 data breaches in the same time frame.

Costs of Healthcare Data Breaches:

One of the primary reasons healthcare organizations are the target of cyber attackers is financial gain. According to a report published by IBM, a typical healthcare data breach costs $6.45 million to the organization. Usually, it fetches $8.19 million. However, an average data breach (25,575 compromised records) costs $15 million in the USA.

How do Cyber-attacks Happen in Healthcare?

Because healthcare organizations hold so much information of significant monetary and intelligence value to cybercriminals and nation-state actors, they are particularly vulnerable to and targeted by cyberattacks. Protected health information (PHI) of patients, financial information such as credit card and bank account numbers, personally identifying information (PII) such as Social Security numbers, and intellectual property relating to medical research and innovation are among the data sets targeted.

The most significant reasons for the security breaches in healthcare organizations are an inadequate employee and client training and the lack of usable security measures. Healthcare professionals are not tech-savvy enough to understand the consequences of a cyber-attack. According to HelloHealth, 90% of security breaches in the health sector happen due to human error, which means that hospital or clinic employees’ unintentional actions, such as downloading or clicking an attachment infected by malware, cause the data breaches.

The insiders are the other source for cyber attackers that help them steal the patient’s data. People working in any healthcare organization with access to confidential data sell that data to cybercriminals and earn a profit. One of the Accenture reports mentions that 29% of healthcare professionals knew someone selling the authorized access to the patient’s data. 47% of the healthcare professionals who took part in the survey mentioned that they were aware of data breaches in their organizations, out of which many were not reported.

The lack of cybersecurity experts is also one reason the healthcare sector faces many security breaches. The Black Book Research found that it takes healthcare organizations 70% more time to hire a cybersecurity professional than other IT jobs. This means that due to the lack of talent in cybersecurity, healthcare organizations are left with no choice except to rely on IT professionals with less or no knowledge to secure the institutions against data breaches and ever-evolving cyber attacks.

Type of Hacking and Cyberattakcs that Result in Healthcare Data Breaches:

Nowadays, stealing personal health information (PHIs) is common in the black market. According to Infosec Institute, a PHI could cost up to $363. For healthcare organizations, the cost per stolen record reaches approximately $355, whereas, for non-healthcare companies, it is almost $158 (half of what it is for the healthcare sector). From these stats, you can determine why healthcare is the primary target of cybercriminals.

However, different types of cybersecurity threats are faced by healthcare organizations:

Malware:

Malware is any software, link, or email, that infects the organization’s data as soon as someone clicks on it. Once a user clicks on malware, it hacks the organization’s data, steals, deletes, or misuses it while blocking critical files and applications access.

Ransomeware and Spyware:

Ransomeware is malware in which the attacker encrypts the files and data and demands some ransom to restore or decrypt the files. However, paying the ransom does not guarantee access or unlocking the files and data. In the first ten months of 2020, the ransomware attacks in healthcare organizations jumped 45%, which was more than double that of other industries.

Spyware is another malware. It is a way to monitor and report the activities of an individual or an organization to a third party for wicked actions.

Phishing and Spear Phishing:

A cyberattack in which the attacker approaches the employees of an organization in one way or another, such as via email, phone call, text message, or any other media acting as a legitimate professional or institution to gather some sensitive information. This information could be passwords, credit card details, and other personally identifiable information.

Spear Phishing is the same as phishing, except it targets specific individuals and organizations. It is much more difficult to detect and has become the cyberattack of choice due to remote health workers and fewer cybersecurity measures.

Denial of Service Attacks:

The denial of service attack targets a specific server, network, or IoT device by bringing up the flood of Internet traffic with an intent to exhaust the resources and bandwidth. Denial of Service attack prevents the healthcare professionals from accessing the network or devices to provide healthcare services or access the sensitive information for their jobs.

How can Healthcare Industry Avoid Data Breaches?

Healthcare organizations are expected to spend $125 billion on cybersecurity to avoid data breaches and security issues. As discussed earlier, the lack of proper education and staff training, and cybersecurity experts, the healthcare sector faces the most significant data breaches among the other industries. The appropriate staff training and education can help healthcare organizations secure their systems and avoid data breaches. Some of the measures that the health sectors can take are as follows:

  • Investing in better IT infrastructure and staff training.
  • Up-to-date cyber planning.
  • Implementing Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) to mitigate the security risks.
  • Investing in the latest technology and cybersecurity infrastructure.
  • Conducting the training to educate the employees and healthcare professionals to learn about the systems and avoid opening or clicking any corrupted files.
  • Consulting to a data center to store their data remotely. The data center will then be responsible for managing and securing the data from the cyber-criminals and any kind of cyberattacks.
  • Conducting data analysis to record which data is being generated in which department and what information is being transferred from one place to another.
  • Using time series analysis for data breach forecasting and risk forecasting.

Pro-Tip: Use Protected Harbor:

Protected Harbor builds a custom protocol for your firm from the ground up to safeguard your data center in the healthcare and medical industries against cyberattacks, outages, and downtime, among other things. Protected Harbor does this while ensuring HIPAA Compliance and securing the PHIs and EHRs. You can use this data center to avoid any risks associated with your data.

Why Choose Protected Harbor?

  • Enhanced security
  • 9% uptime
  • Highest regulatory standards
  • Experienced IT expert team
  • 24×7 remote monitoring

Conclusion:

The implication is that the Healthcare sector is the primary target for cybercriminals as almost every one of us uses healthcare facilities. The amount of data generated, stored, and exchanged by healthcare organizations is extensive. This data includes sensitive data, electronic health records, and patients’ personal health information. Furthermore, all the information regarding internal entities is included in that data. Data confidentiality is difficult in this era of technology, networks, and the Internet as there are so many sources for cybercriminals to hack the systems used in the healthcare sector. The internal entities also serve as a source of providing authorized access to these criminals.

How encryption will stop you from being the next hospital on the news for a data breach.
CybersecurityData Breach

How Encryption Can Prevent Your Hospital from Being the Next Data Breach

by Editor

If you think about healthcare organizations just a decade ago, most were not using cloud-based services or IoT devices. The majority of their data was stored locally. If there were any wireless devices on the network, it was likely for convenience for staff members, but not for patient care or storing data.

Now, let’s fast forward to today where many healthcare organizations have moved almost entirely to the cloud and are utilizing mobile devices in patient care. Healthcare organizations are also moving towards mobile phones being used as patient portals, eliminating paper records in favor of digital-based medical records and reports. All of this movement to the cloud and utilization of IoT devices means that healthcare organizations have to consider whether they have adequate security measures in place.

One of the most effective ways to resolve this issue is to leverage advanced encryption techniques. Encryption is one of the most crucial methods to secure data online. Encryption is a cybersecurity measure protecting sensitive data using unique codes that encrypt data and make it unreadable for intruders. In this paper, we will discuss fast speed symmetric encryption, secure asymmetric encryption, and hash functions. Then we’ll figure out the importance of encryption and how can end-to-end data encryption prohibit data breaches and security attacks.

What is Encryption?

To get secure in this digital world, the fundamental necessity is to hide sensitive data and information from unauthorized users or malicious actors. Encryption is the best way to protect data from being hacked. It’s a process of making data and files unreadable using an encryption key, so if somebody tries to gain access to sensitive data they only see gibberish. Encryption provides security and privacy by hiding information from being shared or hacked by malicious actors. To preserve the integrity and confidentiality of data, encryption is an essential tool whose value can’t be overstated.

The encryption takes place through a proper process. The data that needs to be encrypted is known as plaintext. This plaintext is passed through some encryption algorithms. Apart from it, an encryption key is required using which the plaintext is converted into ciphertext. When the data is encrypted, instead of sending plaintext, the ciphertext is sent over the Internet. Once it is reached to the receiver, they use a decryption key to convert ciphertext into the original readable format.

The need for data security has given birth to various encryption techniques, such as symmetric, asymmetric, hash functions, message authentication codes, digital signatures, and more. But in this report, we highlight symmetric and asymmetric encryption techniques and hash functions to secure data.

What is Symmetric Encryption?

In symmetric encryption, also known as private-key encryption, a secret key is held by one person only and exchanged between the sender and receiver of data. Both the sender and receiver should have a copy of a secret key to transfer data. The recipient should have the same key as the sender before the message is decrypted. The common symmetric encryption algorithms include RC2, AES, DES, RC6, 3DE, and Blowfish. The positive aspect of symmetric encryption is that it is faster. However, symmetric encryption is not much robust technique for protecting data. It can be easily decrypted, hacked, and prone to attacks. But if planned and executed carefully, the risk of decoding can be reduced. Symmetric encryption is suitable for closed systems having fewer risks of a third-party intrusion.

What is Asymmetric Encryption?

Asymmetric encryption, also known as public-key encryption, is a two-key system with a public and a private key. As the name suggested, the public key is available to anyone, but the private key remains with the recipient intended to decode data. The user sends an encrypted message using a private key that is not shared with the recipient. If a user or sending system first encrypts data with the intended recipient’s public key and then with the sender’s private key, then the recipient can decrypt data first using the secret or private key and then the sender’s public key. Using the asymmetric encryption method, the sender and recipient can authenticate each other and protect the data’s secrecy. Examples of asymmetric algorithms include RSA, Diffie Hellman, XTR, ECC, and EES. The positive aspect of asymmetric encryption is that it is relatively safe and secure than symmetric encryption. However, it is slower than symmetric encryption.

What are Hash Functions?

A hash function is a unique identifier for a set of data or information. It’s a process that takes plaintext data and converts it into unique ciphertext. Hash functions generate unique signatures of fixed length for a data set. There is a unique hash for each data set or a message that makes minor changes to the data or information that is easily traceable. Data encryption using hash functions can’t be decoded or reversed back into the original format. Therefore, hashing is used only as a technique of verifying data. Hash functions are used to ensure data integrity, protect stored passwords, and operate at different speeds to suit different processes.

Importance of Encryption in healthcare

For healthcare businesses, encryption is one of the most useful data protection solutions. Even if attackers obtain access to the data, healthcare providers and business associates can make it more difficult (preferably impossible) for them to read patient information by encrypting data in transit and at rest. HIPAA makes recommendations but does not require healthcare organizations to implement data encryption measures; instead, the rule leaves it up to healthcare providers and business associates to determine which encryption methods and other measures are necessary or appropriate in light of the organization’s workflow and other requirements.

There are a lot of reasons for using encryption techniques. Its importance can be defined by the following points. Encryption is important for data security because it provides:

  • Confidentiality_ It’s the most essential reason as it ensures that no unauthorized user can understand the shared information except one having the decipher key.
  • Data Integrity_ It ensures that the received information or data has not been modified from its original format. While transferring data online, it may get changed by malicious actors. However, data integrity confirms that data is not intact by an unauthorized user. It can be achieved by using hash functions at both sender and the receiver end to create a unique message.
  • Authentication_ It’s a process of ensuring the identity of the intended recipient. It means that the user has to prove its identity to access the information.
  • Access Control_ It’s a process of restricting unauthorized users to access data. This process controls who can access resources and prevent data from malicious actors.

Conclusion

As recommended in the HHS HIPAA Security Series, Health IT Security addresses the two essential considerations that healthcare companies should examine when evaluating an appropriate amount of encryption and whether encryption is required:

What data should be encrypted and decoded to avoid unwanted access to ePHI (either by unauthorized persons or applications)?

What decryption and encryption technologies are required, reasonable, and suitable in this scenario to prevent unauthorized people and apps from accessing sensitive health data?

Protected Harbor’s CEO, Richard Luna, claims that encryption is especially important in the mobile environment “where providers are talking with one another about a case or a series of instances that they may encounter with patients who have a set of opportunities, problems, and situations.” You want to keep that information safe.”

Insurance information, medical data, and social security numbers are examples of PHI. Due to a lack of encryption, healthcare organizations should not risk disclosing this information. Protected Harbor’s products are HIPAA-compliant and may be readily integrated into existing healthcare systems. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you protect your PHI with our hardware encrypted solutions.

Close up of a senior man consulting with a doctor on his phone
Cybersecurity

How to Secure Mobile Medical Device from Hackers in 10 steps.

by Editor

With the increase in mobile device ownership which includes smartphones and tablets, it’s no surprise that more and more people are looking to the internet for answers to their health concerns. While this is good for patients, it’s also an attractive target for hackers.
We have access to the health information on our smartphones, which can be useful when we need to know something quickly. However, this convenience comes at a cost—we’re not always aware of the risks that come along with using a mobile device to store and share sensitive information.

It’s been reported that less than 50 percent of Americans have taken action to protect their personal health information on a mobile device. (Source; Akasa Automation Report). The benefits of protecting this information are far too great for any person, company, or organization to ignore. It can be secured and protected by applying the following ways:

Password Authenticator

Password authentication is a method in which a user enters a unique ID and key, which is then compared to previously stored credentials. It is one of the quickest forms of security; you can set up your device to require some identification before letting someone access your phone. It can be in a Passcode, PIN, Password, Fingerprint, or 2-factor authentication can be adopted as well.

Multi-factor authentication or 2FA is an additional layer of protection that verifies that anyone attempting to access an online account are who they claim to be. The user must first provide their username and password. They will then be requested to submit another piece of information before they can receive access.

Installing and Enabling Encryption

Encryption is the process in which you convert your data into a form that cannot be accessed or decrypted without the relevant password or key. As a security protocol businesses should encrypt all the data, including the data on mobile devices with information you are receiving and sending to others.

No matter what source of communication you are using, your data remains protected from any unauthorized users and breaches. Encryption of data can be done with various methods, but you might have first to test out your phone’s encryption capabilities if it has built-in full disk encryption or AES 128/ 256 encryption. If it does not have built-in encryption, you might have to use third-party software such as dm-crypt to do the job or work with your Managed IT services to ensure mobile data encryption is included in the device’s security plan.

Use Remote Wiping/Disabling

Remote wipe is a security feature that allows a network administrator or device owner to send a command to a computer device that erases data. It is generally used to wipe data from a device that has been lost or stolen so that the data is not compromised if the device falls into the wrong hands. It can also be used to delete data from a device that has changed owners or administrators and can no longer be physically accessed.
Remote wiping is regarded as a security feature that can be used to wipe your medical device from anywhere around the world if it is lost or stolen. Patients take the medical devices with them to home for gathering and monitoring their health data and end up getting them lost. When used correctly, this feature can save all the essential information and data stored on your phone from the hands of a stranger.

Some mobile devices come with this feature in-built and can be enabled through the safety and privacy or lost device settings. You can set it up and control your phone with your desktop or laptop. Besides this, you can also use it so that if there is an excessive passcode failure, your device will be temporarily disabled to save your data from being compromised.

Install only trusted File-Sharing Applications

Some software’s are designed to share or trade your data with other phones or devices using an internet connection. Such applications can have uninterrupted access to all the files on your phone without your knowledge. Sharing data through these applications is subject to malware, hacking, and loss of sensitive information. Therefore make sure to share files through hardline connections only or use only trusted apps that are HIPAA compliant file-sharing platforms.

Therefore, you should pay close attention to the software that has permission to access your data. If you don’t see the need for an application or find it suspicious, disabling or uninstalling such applications reduces your risk of leaking personal information.

Use a Firewall

You can intercept all the unnecessary incoming and outgoing attempts by simply introducing a personal firewall to your connection. It can block any malicious attacks and only allows connections that fulfill the set criteria. For healthcare businesses, just a simple firewall on your system won’t work rather work building remote management of firewall policies into the devices themselves. Along with firewall activity logging and disabling unnecessary non-healthcare IT ports.

If your device has a built-in firewall, you should activate it as soon as possible, and if you are having trouble finding it, you can always find a solution on the internet. But in case it doesn’t, you can also download third-party software that can do this job.

Using Security Software

Security software is designed to protect your healthcare device from any malicious software or files; this includes viruses, malware, and spam. Doctors, nurses, and healthcare professionals use tablets for patient info all the time. You can increase the security level of your device by installing good security software such as PC doctor and mdsguard and keeping it up to date.

This type of software comes in various forms, each having its designated role, such as anti-theft, anti-virus, anti-malware, firewall solutions, etc.

Keep Your Security Software Up to Date

Security risks and threats such as viruses and malware are changing their codes hastily. To keep up with these changes, keep all of your security software up to date so that they are ready to tackle any threat that comes their way.

Research Mobile Applications Before Downloading

There is a plethora of excellent health apps and technology available today. Third-party apps, on the other hand, come with third-party code flaws. When you integrate that product into your system, the entire network is put in danger. Ascertain that the app’s security meets FDA and HIPPA requirements. Any mobile application has the capability of compromising your data to the wrong hands. They can copy your contacts, get information about your address, passwords, or any other private data without you ever knowing about it.

Therefore, whenever you download an application for your phone, make sure that you read all the specifications and required permissions first. You can install the application only after you completely understand it. Also, TEST TEST TEST. Avoid having to respond to breaches and device failures in the field by detecting security flaws during development and testing.

Maintain Physical Control

Another method to secure your data is to remain in physical control of your device at all times. A small and portable mobile phone has a greater risk of being lost or stolen, which can easily result in your data being compromised in the wrong hands.

On the other hand, not letting other people use your device, locking your device when not in use, and physically securing it can exponentially increase your security and save your device from any external breach or tempering.

Secure Your Information on Public Wi-Fi

Public Wi-Fi connections are the hub of public gathering, and this means that there are loads of data being transferred from mobile devices and the internet connection points. The problem with these connections is that they don’t have any security, and your data can be quickly interrupted while being transferred.=

It is why you should never opt to use them in the first place. But in case of an emergency where you don’t have any choice, you should have a VPN (Virtual Private Network) software on your phone that can encrypt all of your data while passing through the internet connection.

Conclusion

There’s no easy answer to this question. It’s always a good idea to be careful about what you share with others, but that doesn’t help when your device is already infected with malware.

To summarize, be smart when using health apps on your mobile device. Consider how much valuable information you may be inadvertently giving away. Also, remember to be proactive each time you download an app and read through the terms and conditions of service carefully.

When it comes to protecting your health information on a mobile device, the first thing you should do is evaluate what apps and data you need access to. You can also use various solutions that exist today such as Protected Harbor’s Protected phones with a secure remote wipe system and set strong passwords for every app that stores sensitive health information. Protected harbor with its experienced team and state of art technologies has been servicing the healthcare industry, contact us now to know how we do it.

Cybersecurity

10 Tips for Healthcare Organizations to Minimize Security Threat

by Editor

With the advent of IT in Healthcare and the increased use of technology and computers to store and manage patients’ data, healthcare organizations continually face evolving cyber threats. Technology has continuously introduced new challenges to the healthcare industry, and hackers have taken note. Health information is valuable in the black market, and it is now more critical than ever for healthcare organizations to protect themselves from cyberattacks. The more a healthcare organization relies on technology, the more vulnerable it becomes to a cyberattack without a proper safety infrastructure. The patient’s safety and privacy are so jeopardized.

Healthcare has seen a significant increase in coverage and connectivity with the growing application of mobile devices, telemedicine, and health technology. 12.5 million records were breached containing medical and patient information in 2021. (Source – https://cit.cyberpeaceinstitute.org/)

The cyber threats and security vulnerabilities to healthcare facility data can jeopardize patient protected health information (PHI), distract healthcare professionals, as well as potentially harm its reputation within your community.

Protected Harbor presents a 10-step checklist that Healthcare IT professionals can implement to overcome the cyber security challenges:

Understand your Network Map:

IT professionals in the healthcare industry employ several technologies to identify the devices and data on their networks. By doing this, they will know what unknown and unauthorized devices are connected to the network and which data is more prone to vulnerabilities. Using such technology will also restrict unwanted devices from accessing the network or data.

Update All Office Software:

It is essential for Healthcare IT professionals to ensure that all the software and operating systems throughout the organization are up to date and maintained as cyber attackers may try to invade the system via previously found weakness or bug in the software. Security maintenance and software updates must be done regularly.

Improve Your VPN Encryption:

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is an excellent way to hide the information that your computer sends or receives. You may prevent hackers from receiving any information about your network by encrypting it, even if they are monitoring your computers, by encrypting it.

Move to a Virtual Server:

By moving to a virtual server, you can better control who can access your data, information, and systems. Furthermore, virtualization provides efficient access to shared records, increased security, and an easy transition to mobiles.

Use Effective EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response Tools):

The EDR tools detect any attackers trying to evade a healthcare system. The Healthcare IT Professionals should use practical EDR tools to ensure that the system is protected from attackers and any hacking attempts are appropriately tackled.

Conduct Regular Audits:

The IT Administrators in healthcare organizations should conduct regular audits from time to time. They should make sure that any new information is added or the authorized users update any existing data. The users are creating strong passwords that are hard to crack, and access should be reviewed so that the previous employees could not access the patients’ data.

Install Remote Wiping and Disabling on all Mobile Medical Devices:

The Remote Wiping or disabling enables you to remotely remove or deactivate any accounts on mobile devices. The Healthcare IT Professionals should install some Remote Wiping tools on all the portable medical devices to erase the data from the devices if they get misplaced or stolen.

Isolated Backup and Validate the Backup:

Isolated backups ensure that ransomware does not infect your backup repository. If this happened, it would be a very horrible day, and it can happen right now. Many backup tools mount volumes to infected workstations, backup to this mount point, and then unmount.

The technique for creating isolated backups varies by product, but the most critical step is to make sure the backup repositories aren’t accessed like a filesystem. To put it another way, backup tools that mount repositories or target systems should be avoided. There are two aspects that must be safeguarded. The repository is one thing, and the backup server is another.
The remote backup should be validated from time to time to maintain an updated status of the data. When you have a remote backup, you can quickly recover all your data even if the local backup has been affected by a cyberattack.

Use Two Factor Authentication:

The passwords can easily be guessed or hacked by attackers. The Two Factor Authentication requires that the user enter two or more factors to authenticate himself before accessing any computer, network, or system. Whenever someone tries to make changes in the existing data or add new information to the system, the system should authenticate the user through two-factor authentication. Healthcare IT professionals should try to implement the Two Factor Authentication.

Use Professional Services:

To achieve more cyber security and tackle any issues you face regarding the safety of your data and system, you should seek professional help and assign the task of managing the system security to some external agency. This way, you will be able to achieve a system that is less prone to any attacks.

Pro Tip: Use Protected Harbor:

The Protected Harbor is a data center that provides you with the best solutions to tackle most of your healthcare organization’s information system and networks issues. It protects your data centers from attacks, outages, and downtime in the best ways possible.

The Protected Harbor offers you:

  • Enhanced Security
  • Quick Access Anytime
  • Reduced Downtime
  • Work in Realtime

Furthermore, it offers Free IT Consultation for you to get better advice. You can choose whatever payment plan suits you the most. The Protected Harbor provides the services at the most reasonable price. So, why compromise your data security to save some money? Visit www.protectedharbor.com now and choose the best plan or consult the IT specialists for free!

Conclusion:

In a nutshell, this passage suggests the best yet most effective techniques to prevent any cyber-attacks and minimize the security threats that a Healthcare organization may face regarding its information system or the network. By following the guidelines provided in this passage, you will achieve a highly secure information system. This way, your data will be more protected from any unauthorized access or cybercriminals.

Technology

Stop Security Threats to IT Systems and Networks in 24 hours.

by Editor

Healthcare organizations have always been vulnerable to different types of cyber threats. The recent reports by the Department of Health and Human Services highlight that healthcare is facing more severe security threats. To make IT systems more secure, organizations need to have a proper defensive approach to minimize data security threats, particularly ransomware attacks. The key to implementing such defensive measures is understanding the potential cyber threats. The data includes the patients’ information in Electronic Health Records (EHR) or electronic journals. The patient’s information is the most sensitive piece of data a Healthcare organization holds. The more sensitive information an organization has, the more it’s crucial to secure the data, as the attackers and hackers can get loads of data by breaching a single system.

In addition to data theft, the other security threats that Healthcare IT (HCIT) face includes:

  • Ransomware
  • Denial of Service
  • Phishing

Although Healthcare Organizations nowadays use technology to make their systems as secure as possible, they still need to take some measures to minimize these security threats to their IT systems and Networks.

By using the guide given in this article, you can prevent your system from Healthcare Data Breach:

  • Use Two-Factor Authentication:

Two-factor authentication(2FA), also known as multi-factor authentication (MFA), is used by most companies to validate who accesses their system. It requires users to verify their identity by using only authenticated users’ information. Implementing two-factor authentication in a healthcare IT system is essential to comply with HIPAA laws and protect patients’, employees’, and other organizational data. Furthermore, it helps secure the system by ensuring that only authenticated and verified users access the system at any given time.

The healthcare organization can implement the two-factor authentication either by developing their system or integrating a pre-built tool such as:

  • Duo Security
  • Google Authenticator
  • Last-Pass
  • One-Login

Move to a virtual server:

A server that shares the hardware and software resources with other operating systems is called a virtual server. You can re-create the functionality of a physical server through a virtual server. Multiple virtual servers can be set on a single physical server. They help in better resource allocation and utilization and allow for hardware independence, mobility/failover, and advanced disaster recovery. By moving to a virtual server, healthcare organizations can control who accesses their data, information, networks, and systems and improve resiliency and uptime.

Moving to a virtual server is essential as it has so many benefits that address the security concerns that a healthcare organization faces. These benefits include getting the ability to prioritize the critical traffic and improving the network agility while reducing the burden from the IT department.

A healthcare organization can move to a virtual server by using any industry-standard hypervisor (virtualization software), such as:

  • VMWare
  • Microsoft Hyper-V
  • SolarWinds Virtualization Manager
  • V2 Cloud
  • Parallels Desktop
  • Oracle VM Virtual Box

Use Effective EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response Tools): 

The Endpoint Detection and Response Tools (EDR) is the technology that alerts the security teams regarding any malicious activity or security threat. They enable fast investigation and containment of attacks at endpoints (an employee’s workstation, a cloud system, a server, mobile or IoT device).

Using Effective EDR tools can help you improve the security of your network by aggregating data on endpoints, including process execution, endpoint communication, and user logins. It is vital to use practical EDR tools to detect and respond to any suspicious activities as soon as they are performed.

Here is a list of the best EDR tools:

  • FireEye
  • Symantec
  • RSA
  • CrowdStrike
  • Cybereason
  • Cynet Security
  • System Center Configuration Manager Endpoint Protection

Understand Your Network Map: 

A network map visualizes the devices on a network, their inter-relationship, and transport layers that provide the network services. It can be considered a tool that provides the network users, administrators, managers, and IT professionals an understanding of network layout and performance.

Understanding the network map is critical to comply with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) laws as it provides an overview of devices and data on your network. This overview is crucial in identifying and minimizing the attack surface of a system. It will also uncover devices that IT staff may not know are there- for instance, an old, decommissioned server.

To monitor your network map, you can use tools that help you understand the interconnectivity of devices and data flow through the network. Understanding the data flow can help pinpoint what information is vulnerable to attack and how. Here is a list of tools specifically developed for this purpose:

  • SolarWinds Network Topology Mapper (NTM)
  • Edraw Max
  • Paessler PRTG Network Monitor
  • Nagios
  • ManageEngine OP Manager
  • Lucid Chart and so on.

Update All Software:

Different Healthcare organizations use multiple software throughout the organization to perform various tasks. Different versions of the software are released from time to time to reduce the weaknesses and other loopholes in the previous versions.

Keeping all the software up to date is essential for the better performance of the software. It also helps discourage potential cyber criminals who take advantage of previously-found weaknesses in software.

Whenever a new version of the software is released, the software developers inform all users regarding the updates. The IT admins should update all the software and operating systems throughout the organization from time to time to keep their IT system and network security.

Improve Your VPN Encryption: 

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) helps you establish the private network while using the public networks. You can encrypt your internet connection and hide your online identity using a VPN. VPN encryption is a process by which a VPN hides your data when it enters and passes through its tunnels.

Being a healthcare organization, hiding your network details is essential as much critical data is being sent and received over your network. When using a VPN, you can stop attackers from getting any information regarding your network even if they already monitor it.

You can use and improve your VPN Encryption by:

  • Using IPSec Protocols
  • Using the most robust encryption and hashing algorithms and key groups (AES256, SHA256, DH14)
  • Stopping DNS Leaks
  • Using a Kill Switch
  • Using a Network Lock
  • Stopping IPV6 Leaks
  • Limiting VPN Access

Conduct Regular Audits:

Auditing is a process of examining how well a healthcare organization’s system conforms to an established set of security criteria. It includes assessing the security of the system’s physical configuration, information handling processes, user practices, and software.

Conducting regular audits is vital to identify security problems and system weaknesses, establish a security baseline to compare the future audits, comply with internal and external security policies, and identify unnecessary resources. It also helps ensure that any information is being added or updated in the system by an authenticated user, and no one can access the system without verifying their identity.

While performing an audit, system administrators should ensure that the system uses two-step authentication, all users use a strong password, and change it at regular intervals. They should also evaluate the access credentials to ensure that the previous employees do not access the data.

Install Remote Wiping and Disabling on all Mobile Medical Devices:

Remote wiping and disabling is a way to remotely remove or lock the data and user accounts from a mobile device if it is misplaced or stolen. Having remote access to your devices is a significant security feature that helps you control your device remotely.

It is essential that healthcare organizations install remote wiping and disabling on all mobile medical devices to remove their data and accounts if it ever gets stolen or lost. Remote wiping and disabling is a security function that allows you to remotely erase the data on the device or lock the device, even when the device is lost or stolen. You can destroy data stored on your lost or stolen mobile device if you enable the remote wipe feature on your device.

Nowadays, most devices have in-built remote wiping and disabling features that the authorized user can easily enable. But, if a device does not have it, any remote wiping and the disabling tool could easily be installed on the device.

Isolated Backups and Validate the Backup:

A backup that is stored separately from other backups and is inaccessible from the end-user layer is called a remote backup. Creating an isolated backup helps reduce security breaches, especially ransomware attacks. Ransomware is an attack that quickly encrypts all files on a hard drive and starts attacking other devices connected to a network. Creating local backups is not enough to prevent the system and network from this attack, so isolated backups are the best choice. An organization can quickly recover all its data if it has a remote backup.

A remote backup can be created by moving a backup on remote servers and an isolated network that can be accessed occasionally. Once created, it should be validated from time to time to keep it updated.

Use Professional Services:

Although healthcare organizations have many options to increase their system and network security and manage the potential threats, it does not meet the level of expertise required to mitigate these threats. Using a professional service is important as you cannot handle all types of threats yourself. You, at some point, will need to seek professional help to tackle the security breaches, so it is better to assign the task of managing the system security to an external agency. This way, you will no longer have to worry about data and network security, and your team will be able to focus on medical-related tasks.

There are so many professional services available to help you protect your data and network, such as:

  • DataNetworks
  • Keyavi Data
  • Digital Guardian
  • Protected Harbor

Protected Harbor data center is the best solution to tackle most of your healthcare organization’s information system and network issues.

We offer you:

  • Enhanced Security
  • Quick Access Anytime
  • Reduced Downtime
  • Work in Realtime
  • 99.99% uptime

Healthcare IT professionals must take action now to minimize security threats. Protected Harbor helps healthcare IT professionals protect data and applications, increase uptime, and reduce costs.  So, why compromise your data security to save some money? Contact us today to learn more about how you can secure your healthcare data.

Data Breach

How to stop a data breach

by Editor

Data breach has become more common every year. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) data breach 2021 report there were over 1291 data breaches that exposed more than 7 billion records last year. Data breaches can harm your company’s reputation, bringing production to a halt, and even cause enough financial harm to send your company under. In this article, we will review what is data breach and how to stop one?

What is a data breach?

A data breach is a cyber-attack where unauthorized individuals gain access to sensitive personal or confidential information. When a security breach occurs, the hacker can steal and misuse personally identifiable information (PII) such as social security numbers, credit card details, bank account numbers, and even your protected health information (PHI) that could be used for fraudulent activity. A data breach on an organization leads to the release of client information or internal content, moreover, it can be intentional (theft, sabotage) or unintentional (internal error).

Among the data breaches, this year, the manufacturing and utilities sectors were deeply affected, accounting for 48 breaches and 48,294,629 victims. The healthcare sector was second, with 78 compromises and more than 7 million victims. In addition, financial services, government, and professional services each sustained more than 1.5 million victims.

Security magazine’s top data breaches list for 2021:

  • Brazilian Database — 223 million, January
  • Bykea — 400 million, January
  • Facebook — 553 million, August
  • LinkedIn — 700 million, June
  • Cognyte — 5 billion, June
  • Other notable breaches: Ubiquiti, Clubhouse, USCellular, Twitch, T-Mobile, Panasonic, GoDaddy

 

How do breaches happen?

Data breaches come in many forms. In the case of Asian delivery and rental company Bykea, it was a lack of server encryption. A flaw in Facebook’s address book contacts import feature was their undoing. Cognyte let an unsecured database get indexed, Twitch got hit due to a bad server configuration, and for T-Mobile, it was weak access control points.

Missing Security Patches –  Security tools can become outdated quickly and updates are needed to stop new threats. It’s not just antivirus software that needs patching, many network-level vulnerabilities are caused by unpatched Cisco, Microsoft, and Apache applications.

Unencrypted Data – It is simply plaintext or unaltered data that can be accessed by anyone. This can be sensitive information stored online on cloud servers with no layers of protection. By using encryption, you can prevent brute force attacks and cyberattacks, such as malware and ransomware. Using encryption, data is protected while being transmitted in the cloud or on a computer system.

Phishing – This is the most common hacking technique, that can trick an employee into clicking on a link or opening an attachment. Phishing attacks are used by hackers to gain direct access to a target’s email, social media, or other accounts or to change or compromise connected systems, such as point-of-sale machines and order processing systems.

Spyware – This is a type of malware that tracks your activity until a hacker has what they need to strike. Employee’s don’t even have to download an infected file to get tagged with spyware,

Worms – This is a type of malware hackers install onto a system’s memory. Once installed, worms infect your entire system, stealing data directly, changing system files, or opening a backdoor for hackers to control later on.

Virus – This relies on an employee activating the infected file themselves. The majority of viruses are downloaded from shady websites, usually by people who have no idea what they’re doing. This is another example in support of employee cybersecurity education.

Trojan horses – Attacks of this type pretend to be another program. If you attempt to pirate software or download it from an untrustworthy source, it will often come packaged with a trojan horse. After you’ve installed your program, it often works as it should, but at the same time, a trojan horse is collecting your data or controlling your PC in the background.

Ransomware– The most obvious and dangerous type of malware is ransomware. Viruses, worms, and trojan horses make it onto the computer, and it then annihilates it. To unlock the victim’s system, hackers force them to pay a ransom, often in bitcoin. Victims of cyber-attacks have in some cases paid millions of dollars to get back access to their networks.

How to prevent a data breach?

A data breach is a threat to every organization. It can happen to anyone, from the smallest e-commerce company to the largest bank. Although it’s on the rise, It can be avoided if you know how.

The first step is to stop thinking about your data as “yours” and start thinking of it as “theirs.” The security of your data is no longer just about what you can do to protect it; now, it’s also about what others can do to steal it. It’s not enough to secure your own network. You must also take steps to secure the networks and computer systems of those who connect to yours. Below are the best practices to follow to prevent data breaches:

  1. Educate and train your employees- Employees might be a weak link in the data security chain, and of-course human being human, open suspicious emails every day. A proper training and awareness plan would minimize the chances. As part of this effort, you can teach them how to create strong passwords, how often passwords should be changed, and how to identify, avoid, and report phishing scams.
  2. Create procedures and update software regularly- It’s wise to create data security procedures and update them consistently. Install patches, application software, and operating systems whenever available. Performing regular security audits reveals data integrity and serves as a data protection checklist. Also, perform regular vulnerability checks. Businesses must include in their vulnerability assessments all aspects, from data storage to remote access for employees to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategy as well as policies and procedures.
  3. Data backup, recovery, and remote monitoring- It’s utterly important to have your data backed up because sometimes data breaches can delete your data. Your IT team should have a 24×7 remote monitoring of your network and an automated remote backup system in place. You can work with an MSP if you don’t have a dedicated IT team.
  4. Encrypt data- To maintain the confidentiality of your data while using email or other services, make sure that they are encrypted before they are being sent. Ensure your team has a dedicated Wi-Fi network that the public cannot access. The most sensitive data may need to be restricted from Wi-Fi use since it may allow cybercriminals to intercept it.
  5. Data protection regulations compliance- Organizations must adhere to the regulations and compliances to manage data privacy and people’s data. Companies that store, process, or transmit credit card information must abide by the PCI DSS to safeguard sensitive PII such as credit card numbers. The HIPAA regulations govern who can view and use protected health information, such as the name and Social Security number of patients.
  6. Developing data breach response plan- Even though many companies haven’t developed response plans for breaches yet, such a framework has an important role to play in dealing with cybersecurity incidents, limiting damages, and rebuilding trust among employees and the public. To do this, you need to clearly define the roles and responsibilities of those tasked with handling breaches. A summary of the investigation process should also be included. Additionally, consider multi-factor authentication and encryption as methods of protecting your data.

To wrap things up

A data breach can happen to anyone and when it does, it’s not just your business that is affected. It’s your customers, employees, and brand. To mitigate the risks of a data breach by implementing a strategy that fits your organization’s needs it is important to invest in full-proof security and follow the best practices. Data breach response plans and the security infrastructure vary from organization to organization.

But you don’t have to go it alone. Partnering with a data security and managed IT services provider who understands your business and application needs can help set you up for success. Cisco, Symantec, Transunion, Protenus, and Protected Harbor are some of the top data breach solution providers. With the growing number of data breaches, it’s imperative to have an effective solution in place, so don’t waste any more time, get protected today.

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