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How to Navigate the Shifting Healthcare Cybersecurity Landscape

Cyberattacks and data breaches in the healthcare sector are increasing at an alarming rate, especially during the pandemic when patient communications and records moved online.

Between March 2021 and February 2022, over 42,076,805 healthcare records were exposed. Businesses lose an average of $10.10 million per healthcare data breach, while lost or stolen protected health information (PHI) and personally identifiable information (PII) cost the U.S. healthcare industry billions of dollars annually.

Valuable data makes healthcare organizations a prime target for cybercriminals. Meanwhile, the fast-shifting technology landscape makes it more challenging than ever to keep up with the latest cybersecurity best practices.

Let’s look at the many factors causing today’s cybersecurity nightmare and how you can navigate the changing healthcare cybersecurity landscape with the right technology and processes.

The Healthcare Sector Faces Ongoing Cybersecurity Challenges

The healthcare industry is complex. Various factors have come together in recent years to create the perfect storm for bad actors to breach networks and steal data.

High-Value Target Data: PHI and medical records are sought after by criminals because they’re worth 10 to 20 times the value of credit card data on the dark web. Meanwhile, biomedical and pharmaceutical research and development data drive a $160-billion industry. Criminals can often use the stolen credential to breach multiple targeted systems, giving threat actors many ways to cause damage through lateral movements.

Fast Adoption of New Technologies: The healthcare industry has been implementing connected medical devices (medical IoT) at a rapid pace. The equipment often uses unregulated mobile applications for processing and transmitting PHI and PII. Additionally, many facilities don’t have the proper security protocols to support the proliferation of devices connected to their networks — creating a large attack surface cybercriminals can exploit.

Overworked and Undertrained Personnel: Employee training is key to preventing social engineering schemes, phishing scams, and ransomware attacks — after all, it takes only one staff member to open one malicious attachment to infect the entire system. However, many healthcare facilities fail to provide sufficient cybersecurity education to their employees. Even end users with the knowledge and best intention often let their guard down because of environmental factors, such as distraction and excessive workload.

Competing Operational Priorities: Operational needs, often urgent, require personnel to prioritize speed of information sharing over data security. Meanwhile, facilities must comply with large-scale data portability regulations that require them to make health records and other sensitive information available in digital and sharable formats. These processes can increase the risks of data breaches if providers don’t have the proper security measures in place.

Budgetary Constraints: Healthcare organizations have limited IT budgets, and their tech teams are often stretched thin. They spend most resources on acquiring and implementing new technology solutions to stay current and competitive, leaving few to secure and maintain their networks. Many organizations don’t have in-house security teams and often outsource the function without assigning any internal stakeholders to coordinate the activities or monitor the outcomes.

Inconsistent Cyber Hygiene: Many healthcare facilities are stuck with legacy systems that are no longer supported by the vendor and can’t be upgraded with the latest security features. As such, they introduce permanent vulnerabilities into the organizations’ networks. Additionally, integrating new and old technology solutions may create interoperability dependencies, network segmentation risks, and blind spots hackers can exploit.

The Pandemic Caused New Issues in Healthcare Cybersecurity

The healthcare industry played a front-and-center role during the COVID-19 pandemic, which necessitated the rapid adoption of digital technologies. While the accelerated digital transformation brought many benefits, it also created various cybersecurity concerns.

An Abrupt Shift to Remote Working: Many non-frontline functions moved to a remote working environment in response to lockdowns. Healthcare organizations lack the time and resources to provide adequate security training to remote workers, implement endpoint protection capabilities, and develop remote system backup and recovery plans to build business resiliency and protect themselves from the consequences of ransomware attacks and data loss.

Rapid Procurement and Implementation of Security Tools: The rapid transition to cloud-based platforms for the new hybrid work environment increased the likelihood of misconfigured security settings and mismanaged security tool deployments. Many organizations also lack plans to maintain and sustain the new platforms and technologies, leading to oversight and creating opportunities for threat actors to strike.

Duration and Scope of the Global Crisis: The pandemic created long-term uncertainty. It increases the stress on individuals and society, which, in turn, raises the population’s susceptibility to social engineering. Meanwhile, the need for coordinated responses from facilities across the nation and authorities around the world requires unconventional partnerships and data-sharing practices that caused chain reactions, increased risk factors, and exposed vulnerabilities.

Navigating the Cybersecurity Nightmare in Healthcare: Today’s complex cybersecurity landscape isn’t easy to navigate, especially in the high-stakes healthcare sector. The rise of remote work and telemedicine, plus the proliferation of connected medical devices, has increased the attack surface dramatically. Budget constraints, competing priorities, and lack of employee training leave a lot of opportunities for hackers to exploit. Also, healthcare providers must comply with increasingly stringent data privacy laws to avoid fines and lawsuits.

A Multi-Layer Approach to Cybersecurity: You need a multi-prong approach to address various challenges. The process starts with gaining visibility across all your network environments to understand who has access to what information. Then, prioritize vulnerabilities and resolve gaps in your scan coverage.

Don’t forget to address all your cloud platforms, especially if you have a hybrid environment that combines cloud applications with legacy software where the connections can become weak links and blind spots. Moreover, you must stay current with all relevant data privacy laws, adhere to the latest security configuration standards, and ensure that your vendors and partners are also compliant to protect your data from supply chain attacks.

RedSeal can help you build a solid foundation by creating in-depth visualizations of your security infrastructure. We then use the insights to prioritize your vulnerabilities and automate your compliance process. Get in touch to see how we can help you assess, remediate, and mitigate your security processes and infrastructure.

Do You Need a More Intelligent and Secure Network?

By the third quarter of 2021, the number of recorded network breaches already exceeded the total breach volume of 2020 by 17 percent. What’s more, the total cost of breaches continued to rise. Data from IBM and the Ponemon Institute found that the average cost of a data breach topped $4.24 million in 2021, the highest this value has been in nearly two decades.

What does this mean? Businesses need better ways to react and respond to network security vulnerabilities. While this starts with basic security measures to mitigate the impact of issues as they occur, it also requires the creation of more intelligent networks capable of proactively detecting, identifying, and responding to threats.

Why Security Should Be a Top Priority for Every Organization

Effective security tools are now table stakes for organizations to ensure they meet evolving legislative standards around due diligence and data control. But these straightforward security measures aren’t enough to address the evolving nature of information technology (IT) environments — from rapid cloud adoption to mobile-first environments to the update of edge computing. The sheer volume and variety of corporate IT environments create organizations’ ever-changing challenges.

Increasing complexity also plays a role in security. Driven by the rapid shift to remote work and underpinned by the unstable nature of return-to-work plans, security teams now face the challenge of distributed and decentralized security environments which naturally frustrate efforts to create consistent security policies.

Consider some of the biggest data breaches of recent years:

  • Android: 100 million records exposed. In May 2021, the records of more than 100 million Android users were exposed as a result of cloud misconfigurations. Personal information, including names, email addresses, dates of birth, location data, payment information, and passwords, were available to anyone who knew where to look.
  • Facebook, 553 million records exposed. Facebook records of more than 553 million users from 106 countries were leaked online. Leaked data included phone numbers and email addresses, which according to security researcher Alon Gal, “would certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social-engineering attacks [or] hacking attempts.”
  • LinkedIn, 700 million records exposed. Over 90 percent of LinkedIn members had their data compromised when it appeared for sale online. Information up for grabs included full names, phone numbers, physical addresses, email addresses, and details of linked social media accounts and user names.

Enterprises aren’t the only target for cybercriminals. As noted by Forbes, 43 percent of all cyberattack victims are small and midsize businesses (SMBs). While breaching a large enterprise can be a multimillion-dollar jackpot, SMBs are often easier targets that offer quick gains.

As a result, robust security must be a priority for every organization, regardless of size or industry.

Why Intelligence Matters for Effective Network Defense

While security is a solid starting point, it’s not enough in isolation. To handle evolving threats, companies need intelligent frameworks capable of identifying critical assets, pinpointing key vulnerabilities, and prioritizing security response. This intelligence-led approach is essential to defend IT environments now underpinned by interconnected devices, multiple cloud frameworks, and expanding edge services.

Consider that 92 percent of companies now leverage a multi-cloud approach to maximize efficiency and drive return on investment (ROI). Using multiple clouds offers a way for companies to pinpoint — and pay for — the specific solutions and services they need to achieve business aims. However, ensuring security across multiple cloud touch points rapidly becomes complex, especially as these clouds share and modify data in real-time.

What’s the best-case scenario during an attack? Compromise in one cloud hampers the efficacy of others but poses no substantive risk. And the worst case? Attacks on primary cloud services lead to successive service failures and significant downtime.

To address the challenges of expanding IT environments, companies must take an intelligence-led security approach. In practice, this means deploying tools capable of autonomous action to help detect and report IT threats, combined with robust data collection and analysis to help pinpoint root causes, rather than simply solving for symptoms.

How to Increase Your Network Intelligence and Security

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to increasing network intelligence and security, four functional approaches can help reduce total risk and boost your protective potential.

  1. Comprehensive Cloud Asset Identification: As cloud environments become more complex, the risk of asset blind spots that allow malicious actors to infiltrate networks without detection increases. Robust asset identification across all cloud services — from private clouds to public services such as AWS, Azure, and Google — is critical to limit overall risk.
  2. Complete Network Visualization and Access Management: Sight drives better security. If you can see what’s on your network and how it all connects, you can better identify where potential threats may occur. As a result, companies must deploy tools that offer complete visibility across all network environments and provide robust access control to ensure the right people have access to the right resources.
  3. Consistent Network Compliance: Today’s organizations must follow standards such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and cybersecurity maturity model certification, along with legislation including the General Data Protection Regulation (GPDR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Adhering to these standards and mandates is essential to demonstrate due diligence and protect your organization against penalties or legal action if security breaches do occur.
  4. Critical Vulnerability Prioritization: The scope and scale of new attack vectors make security triage a priority. End-to-end assessment of potential network risks based on exposure and access can help your teams prioritize vulnerabilities and design effective response frameworks.

Closing the Security Gap

No matter your business size, specialization, or industry, you need a more secure and intelligent network. Informed by increasingly complex IT environments and driven by evolving attack vectors, malicious actors are finding — and exploiting — new ways to compromise critical functions. Intelligent response is now critical to increase user confidence, and you must capture key data and protect your network.

RedSeal can help you close the security gap with an adaptable and intelligent approach to network security. From cloud security frameworks to robust network compliance solutions, access and visibility tools, and critical vulnerability prioritization, we have the technology tools and expertise to help your team build a reliable and responsive security framework.

Increase intelligence, navigate network security challenges and reduce real-life risks with RedSeal. Let’s get started.