The Complexity of Healthcare Systems & Vast Quantity of Medical Devices Make the Industry Ripe for Cybercrime
It is no surprise that cyberattacks on healthcare organizations increased dramatically in 2018 and 2019. Then, during the pandemic of 2020, the situation got even worse. Ransomware attacks doubled, phishing emails tripled, and attacks on remote assets quadrupled. In perhaps the most notorious example, ransomware knocked out the entire 400-site network of Universal Health Services for weeks.
Digitalware is dedicated to reducing cyber risk for its clients. For the healthcare industry, in particular, our senior leaders bring deep experience and insight. Digitalware’s Chief Technology Officer, Rob Bathurst, previously served as the Principal Architect for Clinical Security and Cyber Risk at the Mayo Clinic. If cybersecurity in healthcare concerns you, read more about the industry’s problems — and solutions — here.
Risk Hunting for Better Cyber Security in Healthcare
Cyber attacks, like ransomware, can severely disrupt healthcare organizations, despite the best efforts of IT teams. And that can put critical services at risk — from doctors’ offices, test labs, telemetry devices, and more.
Compromised data can also trigger steep fines for HIPAA violations, increase hospital readmission rates, and even endanger patients.
The healthcare field needs a better way to understand risk conditions and their potential downstream impacts.
“Risk Hunting” is a new technique that looks at the current state of technical risks, analyzes how they can spread, quantifies the potential impact by importance, and prioritizes defensive actions.
Cyber Risk Use Case in Healthcare: Mitigating a Critical Vulnerability
A healthcare industry client with over 100,000 endpoints on its network was alarmed when Microsoft disclosed a new vulnerability. The problem, affecting a domain controller, could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the client’s systems.
To understand the client’s risk posture, identify at-risk assets, and quantify the potential impact of an attack, Digitalware went “Risk Hunting” with its Epiphany Intelligence Platform™.
Epiphany enabled the client to answer key questions, accurately assess its risk, and act quickly to mitigate the vulnerability before an attack could occur.
