Guest post by Santosh Varughese, president, Cognetyx.
Santosh Varughese
Since cybersecurity healthcare threats on hospital EHR systems have become a topic of nightly newscasts, no longer is anyone shocked by their scope and veracity. What is shocking is the financial damage the attacks are predicted to cause as they reverberate throughout the economy.
In the 30 days of June 2016, more than 11 million patient EHRs were breached, making it the year’s worst incident according to a study by DataBreaches.net and Prontenus. For comparison, May had less than 700,000 and 2016’s former breach leader (March) topped out at just over 2.5 million.
While traditional security filters like firewalls and reputation lists are good practice, they are no longer enough. Hackers increasingly bypasses perimeter security, enabling cyber thieves to pose as authorized users with access to hospital networks for unlimited periods of time. The problem is not only high-tech, but also low-tech, requiring that providers across the healthcare continuum simply become smarter about data protection and privacy issues.
Healthcare security executives need to pick up where those traditional security tools end and investigate AI cybersecurity digital safety nets. IDC forecasts global spending on cognitive systems will reach nearly $31.3 billion in 2019.
CISOs are recognizing that security shields must be placed where the data resides in the EHR systems as opposed to monitoring data traveling across the network. Cloud deployment directly targeting EHR systems data is needed rather than simply protecting the network or the perimeter.
Pre-cursors to AI are also no longer that reliable. Organizational threats manifest themselves through changing and complex signals that are difficult to detect with traditional signature-based and rule-based monitoring solutions. These threats include external attacks that evade perimeter defenses and internal attacks by malicious insiders or negligent employees.
Along with insufficient threat detection, traditional tools can contribute to “alert fatigue” by excessively warning about activities that may not be indicative of a real security incident. This requires skilled security analysts to identify and investigate these alerts when there is already a shortage of these skilled professionals. Hospital CISOs and CIOs already operate under tight budgets without needing to hire additional cybersecurity guards.
Some cybersecurity sleuths deploy a variety of traps, including identifying an offensive file with a threat intelligence platform using signature-based detection and blacklists that scans a computer for known offenders. This identifies whether those types of files exist in the system which are driven by human decisions.
However, millions of patient and other medical data files need to be uploaded to cloud-based threat-intelligent platforms, scanning a computer for all of them would slow the machine down to a crawl or make it inoperable. But the threats develop so fast that those techniques don’t keep up with the bad guys and also; why wait until you are hacked?
The Mix of Forensics and Machine Learning
Instead of signature and reputation-based detection methods, smart healthcare CSOs and CISOs are moving from post-incident to pre-incident threat intelligence. AI innovations that use machine learning algorithms to drive superior forensics results and deploy pre-incident security are just what the IT doctor should be prescribing.
In the past, humans had to look at large sets of data to try to distinguish the good characteristics from the bad ones. With machine learning, the computer is trained to find those differences, but much faster with multidimensional signatures that detect problems and examine patterns to identify anomalies that trigger a mitigation response.
Guest post by Santosh Varughese, president of Cognetyx
Santosh Varughese
Cybersecurity is a serious concern for every industry in America, but healthcare has been particularly hard hit. It is the most likely industry in the U.S. to suffer a data breach. According to the Ponemon Institute, nearly nine out of 10 healthcare organizations have been breached at least once, and nearly half have been breaced three times or more. Cyber-criminals are clearly winning this war, despite more funding, more firewalls, and more scrutiny. Here are five reasons why healthcare organizations are losing the cybersecurity war.
C-level healthcare executives still aren’t taking data security seriously.
Although the epidemic of healthcare cyber-attacks has C-suite executives claiming they finally realize the gravity of the situation, their actions tell a different story. A recent survey by HIMSS found that while most facilities have given information security a higher priority, healthcare IT personnel still complain of insufficient funding and staffing for cybersecurity. The same concerns were expressed by IT personnel surveyed in the Ponemon study and an earlier study conducted by IBM.
Frontline employees aren’t taking it seriously, either.
A group of security researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth and USC recently conducted an ethnographic study of cybersecurity practices among nurses, doctors, and other frontline medical personnel. The results showed a flagrant, widespread, shocking disregard for even the most basic data security practices; among other things, workers were observed:
Writing passwords on sticky notes and tacking them on machines in full view of anyone who wandered by.
Allowing other staff members to use their login credentials out of “professional courtesy.”
Purposefully defeating automated system timeouts by placing foam cups over sensors or by having another employee tap a spacebar at intervals.
Criminal hackers are fully aware of these types of practices and do not hesitate to take advantage of them; 95 percent of breaches occur when hackers get their hands on legitimate login credentials, either by obtaining them from a malicious insider or by taking advantage of an employee’s negligence or carelessness.
Too many facilities think that HIPAA compliance is sufficient to secure their data.
Most healthcare organizations focus primarily or exclusively on HIPAA compliance, erroneously thinking that complying with HIPAA is all they need to do to secure their systems. However, HIPAA was never meant to be a blueprint for a comprehensive data security plan. The law primarily addresses documentation and procedures, such as specifying when a patient’s medical records can legally be released, not technical safeguards. Information security experts surveyed by the Brookings Institution stated that HIPAA does very little to address the types of security challenges faced by large healthcare organizations with hundreds of employees and highly complex, interconnected data environments. The proof is in the numbers; if HIPAA compliance were enough to protect patient data, 90 percent of healthcare organizations would not have experienced breaches.
Guest post by Santosh Varughese, president, Cognetyx.
Santosh Varughese
The U.S. healthcare industry is under siege from cyber criminals who are determined to access patient and employee data. Information security think tank Ponemon Institute’s most recent report on healthcare cyber security, published in May 2016, revealed some sobering statistics:
In the past two years, 89 percent of healthcare organizations – and 60 percent of their business associates (or BAs) – experienced at least one data breach, with 79 percent experiencing two or more breaches. The most commonly compromised data are medical records, followed by billing and insurance records. These breaches have not declined since Ponemon began tracking them in 2010.
The average cost of a healthcare data breach is about $2.2 million.
Criminal attacks, from outside the organization or from malicious insiders, account for half of all healthcare data breaches, the other half being due to mistakes by employees or BAs.
The majority of respondents (69 percent of healthcare organizations and 63 percent of BAs) feel that the healthcare industry is at greater risk of breaches than other industries. Despite these concerns, the majority of respondents reported that their organizations had either decreased their cyber security budgets or kept them the same.
Another study conducted in April by IBM, found similar problems, as well as insufficient employee training on cybersecurity best practices and a lack of commitment to information security from executive management.
With only about 10 percent of healthcare organizations not having experienced a data breach, hackers are clearly winning the healthcare data security war. However, there are proactive steps that the healthcare industry can take to turn the tide in its favor.
Data Security Starts with a Culture of Security Awareness
Both the IBM and Ponemon studies highlight an issue that experts have been talking about for some time: despite increasing dangers to information security, many healthcare organizations simply do not take cybersecurity seriously. Digital technologies are relatively new to the healthcare industry, which was very slow to adopt electronic records and when it finally did so, it implemented them rapidly without providing employees adequate training on information security procedures.
Unfortunately many front-line employees feel their only job is to treat patients and that information security is “the IT department’s problem.” These employees fail to grasp the importance of data security, and are not educated on the dangers of patient data breaches, reflected in Ponemon’s findings that employee mistakes account for half of all healthcare data breaches.
The healthcare industry needs to adjust this attitude toward cybersecurity and implement a comprehensive and ongoing information security training program, and cultivate a culture of security awareness. Information security should be included in every organization’s core values, right beside patient care. Employees should be taught that data security is part of everyone’s job, and all supervisors – from the C-suite down to the front line – should model data security best practices.
Additionally, organizations should implement physical security procedures to secure network hardware and storage media (such as flash drives and portable hard drives) through measures like maintaining a visitor log and installing security cameras, limiting physical access to server rooms, and restricting the ability to remove devices from secure area. Continue Reading
