Archive for month: September, 2022

Best Practices for Healthcare IT Resilience & Reliability

September 20, 2022/2516 views / 0 Comments/in Guest Blog Posts /by Guest

We might think of cyberattacks as mostly targeting big businesses and individuals, but over the last few years, there have been multiple attacks on healthcare IT infrastructures. Cyberattacks have been aimed at medical, educational, research, and public health organizations and many attacks have shut down critical systems and attempted to steal important data. Such attacks can create chaos in healthcare organizations and can potentially create delays to care. Therefore, it’s crucial that organizations working in the healthcare sector utilize best practices to improve the resilience and reliability of their IT systems to prevent cyberattacks from happening.

Here are some of the top methods your organization can use to enhance its IT resilience and reliability.

Select the Right Framework

First off, it’s important that healthcare organizations select a cybersecurity framework to help them measure and understand the effectiveness of their IT infrastructure and thereby prevent catastrophic cyberattacks, such as ransomware attacks, from happening. With the right framework, organizations can understand and map their abilities to fight threats. Armed with a comprehensive initial assessment, decision-makers and others can then take the right precautions to stay protected against future cyberattacks.

Utilize Visibility Engineering

To develop more resilient systems, healthcare organizations need to focus on visibility engineering, which refers to the design and implementation of mechanisms that capture and report data about assets. Your organization can then gain key insights into things like its applications, server, and data.

In order to determine which of your key assets are worth protecting, you need to first establish the value of your assets. You can do that by mapping out and monitoring your key organizational assets that are required to deliver critical healthcare services. It’s easiest to develop and deploy visibility engineering practices in the cloud rather than on-premises. Using cloud APIs and analytics tools, you can collate and produce reliable data that can give you invaluable insights into your assets. In turn, you can effectively tighten your IT resilience and reliability.

Use Threat Modeling

Using the above methods, you can strengthen your IT resilience and reliability, but it’s just as important that you know how to improve your operational stability to improve resilience further in the face of cyber threats. Therefore, you should make use of threat modeling in both your on-premises and cloud workflows. You can then understand precisely how specific threats could affect your operations and take the appropriate action to prevent attacks from happening. Your healthcare organization should regularly use threat modeling for daily operations. You should also use threat modeling when onboarding service providers and new technologies. By doing so, you can identify the most important tactical security priorities and stop vulnerabilities that threaten your organization’s IT resilience.

Conduct Tabletop Exercises

Even when your healthcare organization uses the right methods to prevent cyberattacks and threats from happening in the first place, your entire organization still needs to be prepared for responding to cyberattacks should they happen. You can do that by using tabletop exercises. The exercises should be carried out by leaders in the organization and your technical response teams, but they should also be carried out by non-technical providers such as clinical teams and people who work in public relations. When you utilize tabletop exercises effectively, you can highlight your organization’s risks and vulnerabilities and know what actions to take should a cyberattack occur. Tabletop exercises should be regularly scheduled.

Establish Antifragile Mechanisms

Antifragile mechanisms enable organizations to learn from failures and make rapid improvements to their systems to be better protected against future cyber threats. The most well-known antifragile mechanism is purple teaming, which is a collaborative exercise that’s performed between people attacking and people defending the attacks. So, purple teaming is a kind of fire drill. Doing the exercise with the utmost realism is a crucial component of purple teaming. The exercise involves observers as well as participants. By simulating actual threats, healthcare organizations can get a much better idea of how resilient and reliable their IT security measures and protocols are and adapt as required to improve their systems.

Another popular type of antifragile mechanism is autonomic security operations, which identify threats using advanced data analytics and use automation to take appropriate actions against those threats.

Make Sure All Elements of Your IT Infrastructure Are Resilient Against Threats, Such as Service Desks

Lastly, it’s important that your healthcare organization uses a secure and modern IT service management solution in order to eliminate barriers to employee support services. That means using a service desk that acts as a point of contact for service requests, configuration changes, and problem management. As with all other components of your organization’s IT infrastructure, it’s vital that things like service desks and help desks are reliable and resilient against threats.

Final Thoughts

With the right approach toward your healthcare organization’s IT resilience and reliability, you can better ensure your IT infrastructure isn’t affected by cyberattacks and threats. So, make sure you introduce the above best practices.

How to Protect Patients from Identity Theft

September 14, 2022/2627 views / 0 Comments/in Guest Blog Posts /by Guest

In today’s evolving world, many processes in healthcare have transferred from analog to digital. While this has increased the level of convenience that many healthcare workers, including physicians, nurses, and receptionists, experience, it has also brought with it a number of new challenges. One of the main problems that have come as a result of the digitalized healthcare system is the threat of cybercrime and, in particular, patient identity theft.

While many healthcare institutions have some basic forms of cybersecurity measures, this isn’t always enough to safeguard patients from hackers with malevolent intentions. Having an understanding of some of the best ways to keep patient information private can make for a more enjoyable and trustworthy patient experience of the healthcare system. Here is how to protect patients from identity theft.

Safeguarding Healthcare Institutions from Outside Theft

Today, there are a number of healthcare cybersecurity challenges that organizations are having to battle. One of the most worrisome of these cybersecurity challenges is that of hackers from outside of organizations hacking into their networks. In order to ensure that patient information is staying private, it’s essential that healthcare organizations set up a number of cybersecurity measures that are meant to protect one’s network from being vulnerable to blackhat hackers and other cybercriminals.

Typically, hackers who attack healthcare institutions are doing so in the hopes of finding financial gain in the process. This can be in the form of a ransom being paid by an organization for the return of information or by utilizing patients’ private information to steal their identities. The first and most important line of defense for a medical institution is its IT and cybersecurity professionals.

By having a staff of professionals with specialized cybersecurity knowledge, healthcare organizations will be able to respond to threats in real-time. This means that patient information has a better chance of being kept private when healthcare organizations have a skilled team of professionals actively working to protect the cybersecurity measures of an organization.

Safeguarding Healthcare Institutions from Inside Theft

While many may have an image of nefarious hackers in different locations when they think of healthcare cyber threats, employees within healthcare organizations can pose just as serious of a threat to patient privacy. This is because employees of healthcare institutions have easy access to the private information of patients, making it an easy procedure for them to steal the identities of patients.

Being that employees have an unprecedented amount of access to the private information of patients; healthcare organizations must be able to detect when patient information is accessed by employees. This way, organizations, and their IT and cybersecurity teams will be able to catch employees who are taking advantage of their access to patient information for nefarious purposes.

Managing Human Error

Unfortunately, though healthcare workers typically do a great job and fulfilling their duties, human error can sometimes put patient privacy at risk. This happens when employees are frivolous and accidentally act unsafely on an organization’s network — potentially leaving a door open for hackers to exploit.

Oftentimes, mistakes such as these come as a result of medical professionals being overworked, stressed, and burnt out. As such, it can be incredibly helpful and useful for healthcare organizations to implement strategies for managing nurse stress and physician stress in the workplace. This will mean that there’s less of a chance that human error will make patient information vulnerable.

As such, ensuring that workers are well rested and not burnt out can be an effective way that healthcare organizations can help to ensure the safety and privacy of patient information.

Updating Devices and Networks

Since the healthcare system used to be run on analog technology, the switch to digital processes is one that can be time-consuming and expensive. This being the case, many healthcare organizations sometimes opt to implement digital processes in the most cost-effective ways. Unfortunately, these cost-effective techniques can sometimes make their organizations and patient information more vulnerable to cyber criminals.

By updating systems, devices, and networks, healthcare organizations have the opportunity to make private patient information more secure. Though it can cost more money, in the long run, healthcare organizations can save themselves an enormous amount of time and energy by updating systems to make them safer and more robust.

Making Employees Aware of Common Forms of Cyberattacks

While higher-ups in healthcare organizations may be extremely familiar with the threat of cyberattacks, many employees within healthcare organizations may not be. This being the case, these employees could unintentionally do things that allow hackers the opportunity to gain access to an organization’s network. As such, organizations can benefit from ensuring that each and every employee is familiar with common forms of cyberattacks so as not to accidentally become susceptible to hackers with nefarious intentions.

This can be achieved by having in-depth cybersecurity training sessions led by cybersecurity experts. Having cybersecurity professionals available can ensure that employees will be able to ask questions that they may have and gain a deeper understanding of good cybersecurity habits. This can allow healthcare organizations to ensure that employees aren’t compromising cybersecurity measures and are upkeeping the privacy of patient information.

Keeping Patients Safe from Identity Theft

While cybercriminals have become savvier in recent decades and are becoming more of a threat to healthcare institutions, organizations can help improve the safety of private patient information by taking a few key steps.

By putting in the time and effort, healthcare organizations can ensure that their networks are secure and they’re not making themselves vulnerable to hackers with the nefarious intention of stealing patient identities. Many healthcare providers also prevent medical identity theft by using biometric patient identification platforms like RightPatient. RightPatient uses patient photos to identify EHRs accurately. Patients only need to look at the camera to verify their identities – this is where fraudsters are red-flagged, preventing medical identity theft in real time.