Important Cybersecurity practices for Healthcare Organizations

By CIOReview | Friday, March 30, 2018

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With the increasing sophistication of attacks on health groups, IT professions need to be alert. It is essential to understand the importance of adapting the best possible cybersecurity practices to protect healthcare organizations in the face of increasingly advanced cyber-threats. As cybersecurity needs to be prioritized to protect patient data, the following may prove useful:

1. The implementation of appropriate cybersecurity defenses requires a detailed understanding of the network and attack surface. This exposes the potential vulnerabilities and suitable solutions can be found to protect the same.

Using multi-factor authentication (MFA) while connecting to the hospital’s applications and systems ensures that only authorized people can access restricted information. This also protects against the use of stolen or leaked credentials in attacks by asking for additional information to confirm the entry—this includes biometric authentication, tokens and codes sent to the user.

Security breaches from internal sources, like contractors or employees with access to privileged information, have been documented. As some of the staff need this permission for their work, a balanced approach providing for monitoring, combined with temporary elevated access and audit trials can reduce the risk of internal threats.

Older security information and event management (SIEM) tools that monitor logs are insufficient owing to the sophistication of present-day attacks. Instead, hospitals need modern SIEM tools utilizing AI and machine learning to analyze security events and network traffic to detect any abnormality and prevent cyber attacks.

Even as hospitals try to safeguard their information, it is essential to be prepared to restore systems in case of a cybersecurity attack. This requires excellent and ready-to-implement disaster recovery and business continuity plans.