Securing healthcare has never been either easy or straight forward given the patient safety dynamic of the industry, but after nearly two years of dealing with the global COVID pandemic, that challenge is now a whole lot harder.
COVID19 caused a massive an immediate pivot across healthcare as patients consults were forced to go online via telehealth and telemedicine. At the same time non-clinical healthcare workers were sent away from hospitals to work from home. Combined this resulted in a significantly changed threat surface that cyber perpetrators were quick to exploit and take advantage of with a succession of ransomware and other extortion attacks and by nation-state sponsored theft of COVID clinical research and vaccine drug formulations.
Since the pandemic there has been a 600% increase in cyber attacks against healthcare entities and many have been knocked off-line for multiple weeks trying to recover from attack. This has resulted in some critical healthcare services not being available to some areas of the country at a very critical time in public health safety. It has also been a very unwelcome distraction to those caring for COVID infected patients and others with non-COVID related diseases seeking treatment.
Despite evidence to the contrary in the latest Healthcare Innovation Survey, many significant healthcare cyberattacks, go unreported or are down-played by CEOs wishing to minimize reputational and financial damage to the organizations they are in charge of. Many are paid based upon on the value of stock or other financial KPIs so this is hardly surprising and its likely that many providers have yet to discover that they have, were, or are still being attacked given the stealthy nature of APT attacks.
Join Hussein Syed, CISO at RWJBarnabus Health, Mark Hagland, Editor-in-Chief at Healthcare Innovation, and Richard Staynings, Chief Security Strategist at Cylera, as three veterans of healthcare security discuss the new reality of securing this industry and keeping patients safe.
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