Fortified’s President Dan L. Dodson recently submitted an article that was published in Healthcare Business Today on the topic: Protect your Organization from Cybersecurity Attacks.
So far in 2017, the U.S. healthcare industry has been experiencing many cybersecurity-related threats, including one massive ransomware attack. This attack might have negatively impacted patient care at hospitals across the nation had a security researcher not found and pulled the “kill switch.” Ransomware attacks, like WannaCry, are just one of the many types of cybersecurity challenges the healthcare industry continues to face. It will become more and more challenging to safeguard sensitive patient data as bad actors continue to target the healthcare market.
Over the last ten years the healthcare industry has rapidly digitized without significant investment in cybersecurity. The balance between providing real-time data to physicians at the point of care in a minimally disruptive manner, coupled with the charge for interoperability, has left the healthcare market more connected and more vulnerable to attacks.
Most healthcare organizations lack sufficient financial resources, struggle with retaining in-house information security expertise, and don’t have the infrastructure to identify and track threats. Furthermore, they are not equipped to analyze and act based on the information and are likely running unsupported legacy systems that cannot easily be updated.
The best prevention against any cybersecurity attack is to take proactive security measures around people, process and technology. This defensive in-depth strategy will position organizations with a multi-layered, multi-faceted approach that will reduce their surface exposure exponentially.