Vulnerability in Health care

With today’s tech savy life, it’s becoming easy for people to depend on them easily. From doing our day to day task, to planning our schedule or to even helping us with the household chores.

One such is the health sector. Ever since they have started to offer life-saving offer it has become easy to depend on the technology rather than manually look into it. With such increase use, it might also lead to cyber theft which increases the chances of cyber threats.

Overview of types of losses

The threats may vary from malware that compromises the integrity of systems and privacy of patients to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that disrupt facilities’ ability to provide patient care. This kind of attacks not only happens in healthcare but also kind sectors too but these kinds of threats are very sensitive and may be misused. The ways through which your data might be misused can be-

· Malicious network traffic: (72%)

· Phishing: (56%)

· Vulnerable OS (high risk) (48%)

· Man-in-the-middle attack: (16%)

· Malware: (8%)

The medium threats are-

· Configuration vulnerabilities:

· Risky hot spots

· Vulnerable OS (all)

· Side loaded apps

· Unwanted or vulnerable app

· Crypto jacking

· Third-party app stores installed

The vulnerable OS refers to an old OS which are easy to target and can easily be hacked due to security exploitation. “Research from early 2020 found that 83% of healthcare systems are running on outdated software.” as said by Allen Bernad, Techrepublic writer.

To overcome such practices, Network controlled solution can be a good move to protect one’s data. NAC identifies each type of user and device and then has the ability to scan for threats or out-of-date spyware protection. NAC solutions can also keep other devices and equipment secure where so many devices are inter-connected.

The man-in-the-middle can be also referred to as insider threat as instances in which employees of an organization steal property or data or commit other crimes. These kinds of people steal the data in either to make money or to commit tax frauds. These can be improved either by auditing all the devices used by the employers or Healthcare providers need to be vigilant in their efforts to monitor access to patient information, and audits can be a reliable way to see who has accessed what information.

Security firm Wandera suggests hospitals to take the following steps in order to protect their patients data-

· Outline requirements for new use cases for cloud and mobile adoption

· Segment data to allow granular access based on user need

· Evaluate use cases and define requirements for remote workers

· Set a device ownership model that covers what support, ownership, and management

· Determine what you need to know about users, devices, and apps before granting access

· Limit users to only the tools and systems they need

· Implement an acceptable use policy for each subset of devices to control shadow IT

· Implement a user friendly identity and access management solution for authentication

· Incorporate device risk assessments into identity management solutions

· Deploy endpoint protection across all devices