In as much as every aspect of healthcare operations is essential to patients' well-being, cybersecurity ranks high as one of the most critical components.
The ability to document, organize, and readily access patients' health records enhances the quality of service they receive. But when that information is lost or compromised due to cyber threats and attacks, they stand a risk of losing their lives. Understanding these cyber risks and how to prevent them is a lifesaver.
What Is Healthcare Cybersecurity?
Healthcare cybersecurity refers to the technical measures healthcare organizations adopt to secure their patients' data and protect their privacy against cyber threats and attacks.
Data privacy is of the utmost importance in healthcare due to the sensitivity of patients’ health records, so stakeholders must uphold it at all costs. It's important to note that the threats that can compromise healthcare cybersecurity aren't solely external but also internal.
There are both outsider and insider threats in healthcare cybersecurity. The former is from strangers while the latter is from people within the healthcare facility. Just as a cybercriminal can attack a medical establishment for malicious gains, a healthcare worker can also expose patients' sensitive records either intentionally or unintentionally.
Healthcare cybersecurity prevents both outsider and insider threats and mitigates damages following a data breach.
What Are the Common Healthcare Cyber Risks?
Healthcare facilities don't only store patients’ sensitive health records. They also receive large sums in payments. Cyber threat actors are eager to get a hold of patients’ payment details, so they can engage in identity theft and financial fraud.
Medical companies must acquaint themselves with the common cyber risks in their domain.
Phishing
Phishing is a process where a threat actor fronts as a legitimate person or institution and lures you into sharing confidential information with them. The attacker bears in mind that you may not be willing to share the information, so they trick you into opening or clicking malware-infected content that gives them access to your network. This type of content usually has a sense of urgency, evokes fear of missing out (FOMO), and is often too good to be true.
Since healthcare organizations cater to the public, they receive lots of emails and other messages. A threat actor can easily pretend to be a prospective patient or business partner and launch a phishing attack.
Ransomware
Ransomware is an attack technique hackers use to take charge of your network and lock you out of it. They encrypt the files in your system, making it difficult for you to open the files without the decryption keys. Having done that, they proceed to demand a ransom from you as a condition for you to regain your system.
Healthcare organizations are prone to ransomware attacks because they possess ransom-worthy data. They would rather pay up than let the attackers expose or compromise their patients' confidential information.
Supply Chain Attack
Supply chain attacks are attacks from any of the multiple areas in a supply chain. Healthcare facilities work with various partners and suppliers that offer products and services they use in their operations. To make their operations seamless, they grant these third parties authorized access to their network.
If healthcare organizations secure their network with access controls, intruders may take advantage of third-party access to execute attacks. Once they get hold of a partner or supplier's login credentials, they will be able to access the organization's network.
5 Ways to Measure Cyber Risks in Healthcare
An effective way for healthcare establishments to secure their digital assets is to measure cyber risks. By doing this, they will have the capacity to strengthen their security infrastructure. How can they go about it?
1. Conduct Risk Assessments
A host of threats and vulnerabilities within healthcare facilities escalate with damaging effects if they linger or go unnoticed. These institutions must conduct risk assessments with credible frameworks such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Risk Assessment Framework to determine their security weaknesses.
Frequent cybersecurity incidents indicate that a system is highly prone to attacks and call for thorough risk assessment. To get the most out of risk assessment, healthcare providers must conduct it regularly, at least twice a year.
2. Gain Complete Visibility
Measuring risks effectively lies on the visibility coverage. Risks don’t exist in a vacuum: they develop from within. To measure the risks in a healthcare system, providers must identify all their digital assets including active applications and services. Leaving these assets unattended could cause damage so they need to understand how the devices function and provide the necessary security infrastructure to keep them out of harm’s way.
Visibility helps healthcare organizations in securing their system's attack surface by enabling them to implement effective attack surface management. It also makes them privy to potential risks before they degenerate.
3. Evaluate the Response Time
Time is of the essence in healthcare cybersecurity. It’s not a question of “if” cybercriminals will target your network but “when”. How fast will your security defenses rise to the occasion? Delays in the incident response time can lead to the loss of critical data.
Healthcare organizations must establish their incident response average time and examine its effectiveness in mitigating attacks. Aim to respond in the shortest time possible, implementing the best security practices to protect your assets.
4. Adopt Standardized Security Frameworks
The results of risk measurement are most accurate when actors use the measurement metrics of standardized cybersecurity frameworks. And with the strict security compliance requirements in the healthcare industry, hospitals are better off implementing frameworks such as the Health Industry Cybersecurity Practices (HICP) that are recognized by the authorities.
By running their security levels against the HICP guidelines, healthcare organizations can ascertain their cybersecurity risks and resolve them accordingly based on the outlined recommendations.
5. Use Peer Benchmarking
Healthy competition among medical organizations enhances the quality of their operations in general. Peer benchmarking is an act of comparing the services, strategy and operations of one organization to another’s. It enables healthcare organizations to access their cybersecurity beyond their immediate environment and think of the larger society.
One might think their hospital’s security infrastructure is up to standards, but when they compare it to another hospital, they may realize that it’s lagging in some areas. This comparison helps you take note of the security lapses and guides you in the right direction for improvement.
Improve Healthcare With Effective Cybersecurity
The daily operational details of healthcare institutions may differ, but they all share a common goal of saving lives. Digitizing patients’ records is key to simplifying healthcare delivery, and those records can only be useful when they are secure.
Securing healthcare systems is a win for everyone—we will all benefit from it in one way or another, especially when our loved ones or we need medical attention.
With stronger healthcare security, healthcare providers will be able to create and access their patients’ records easily and administer the best treatments.