Hong Kong Hospital Crisis Easing

Patients left in hallways due to overcrowding at Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Photo: Sam Tsang. A capacity crisis in Hong Kong's hospitals is beginning to ease thanks to money being made available by the Government for an expansion of healthcare services to meet growing demand. This was the message I received during meetings this week with senior health leaders in Hong Kong. Earlier this year Chief Executive Leung Chun-Ying promised that public...

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Australian Healthcare Highly at Risk

Just learned that my interview with Nick Whigham at Australia's www.news.co.au has gone viral. The interview which was published last week, talks about the general state of security surrounding the Australian Healthcare industry and is based upon two weeks of workshops and other meetings I ran across the country in November with Senior Healthcare Executives. The full article can be found here...

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Aussie Healthcare Scrambles to Catch Up

Assessing the cybersecurity outlook for Australian Healthcare.   Photo: Paul Carmona, Sydney. Australian Healthcare providers are scrambling to defend against increasingly well-armed and financially-motivated opponents in the battle between good and evil going on across cyberspace. After years of staying out of the spotlight, healthcare is now being targeted by cyber gangs looking to get rich quickly, and foreign nation states seeking...

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Kiwicon X

Kiwicon X, Wellington, New Zealand Part hacker conference, part cult event, part rock concert; Kiwicon X fully lived up to expectations this week. Attendees were treated to an almost constant barrage of live hacks, demonstrations, presentations and more live hacks in the southern hemisphere's answer to Black Hat without the tackiness and desert heat of Las Vegas. That's not to say that attending Kiwicon is in any way safer then Black Hat -...

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Light at the end of the tunnel for New Zealand Healthcare

Despite continuing austerity measures across the country, there is light beginning to appear at the end of the tunnel for New Zealand Healthcare. This includes a number of measures underway to expand capacity to reduce waiting times. It also includes some long-needed improvements to cybersecurity and privacy. This was the message I received during meetings this week with the New Zealand Ministry of Health in Wellington. The Ministry of Health...

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Turning Cybersecurity into a Strategic Advantage

Most C-suite leaders think about cybersecurity as a way to stop threats. But in today’s intensely competitive digital economy they should be thinking about cybersecurity as a strategic advantage that not only protects business value, but enables new business value. The prevailing focus on threats to protect business value isn’t surprising. Modern digital businesses go beyond traditional walls and spawn new attack vectors in today’s dynamic...

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Insiders: The often forgotten threat

Insider threats are of particular concern to organisations, as the impact of a rogue insider can be catastrophic to the business. The 2016 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report showed that 15% of data breaches were a direct result of insider deliberate or malicious behaviour. Given that it is not likely that all insider breaches are discovered and/or reported, this number may well be under represented in Verizon’s statistics. In addition,...

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The 'Senior Cyborgs' are Coming!

The Silver Tsunami of Baby Boomers hitting retirement by itself would be enough to worry the most well prepared healthcare system, however in the United States, rising healthcare delivery costs and little to no change in the number of professional caregivers is putting the system under never before seen pressures. Everyone is looking to provide more cost-effective ways to provide care and keep people independent, safe, happy and healthy...

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Taiwan National Day

The Author pictured here with Ambassador Zhang Chu Zhang I was privileged to be invited to celebrate Taiwan National Day this year with an assembly of Ambassadors, Senators, Congressmen, State Representatives, Mayors, retired Generals and other US military personnel who served in the 1950s and 60's protecting the country at the height of the Cold War. Economic, political and cultural relations with the Republic of China (Taiwan) have never...

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GA HIMSS 2016

Cybersecurity was the topic de jour at the GA HIMSS Annual Conference in Atalanta this week as the author co-hosted a session with Dmitry Kuchynski of Cisco on the cyber threats and possible mitigations impacting hospitals, clinics and primary care facilities. Richard Staynings and Dmitry Kuchynski received a warm welcome @ GA HIMSS In attendance were an assembly of healthcare CEOs, CIOs, CISOs and other executives all keen to learn...

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Security in Healthcare: Bolstering Connectivity and Protecting Patients

Connectivity and the Internet of Things (IoT) are pushing the boundaries of healthcare treatment. Medical professionals can access patient data and real-time health status in a way that can dramatically enhance their understanding of the progression of a disease and improve their response to patient health incidents. Medical equipment can automatically identify system failures and even generate maintenance tickets. Remote treatment allows doctors...

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Cisco 2016 MCR

Cisco’s 2016 Midyear Cybersecurity Report is released this week presenting the latest research, insights and perspectives from Talos and the rest of Cisco Security. It updates security professionals on the trends covered in Cisco’s previous security report while also examining developments that may affect the security landscape later this year and beyond. The report highlights recent developments from the dark net and within the shadow economy,...

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Ransomware – a wake up call for effective security controls

“The digital canary in the digital coal mine” A “canary in the coal mine” is an idiom that refers to an early warning sign for upcoming trouble.  This comes from the day when there was no technology to detect leaks from unseen pockets of toxic gas in the rock of a coal mine. Canaries are more sensitive to the toxic gas in the mines than humans so miners used to take poor canaries with them as an early warning sign of toxic gas. If the...

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The Changing Face of the Healthcare Security Leader

Yesterday’s Healthcare Security Leader A mere ten years ago, if you worked with just about any hospital or healthcare provider you may have come across the Information Security Manager, Director of Security and Compliance, or someone who filled this role under another title. Their role was to lead ‘IT Security’ and manage a small staff of security administrators or analysts, whose role in turn, was to provision users to systems, and troubleshoot...

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OISC

Richard Staynings keynotes the Ohio Information Security Conference We need to get out of the reactive security operations mode that many organizations are stuck in. We need to get away from checking 'after-the-fact' logs of security events that tell us we were hacked over the weekend when no one was watching, and the perpetrators are now long gone. Oh, an incidentally, they got out with a whole heap of valuable information that is going cause...

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