The Cybersecurity Challenge

Protect Patient Information and Confidential Organizational Data

In the past, the requirements for protection of patient and confidential organizational data were for a firewall to protect threats from entering the network, and for an Anti-Virus application to protect endpoints from becoming infected. Those days are gone forever. Now, the "attack surface," or areas to be protected includes seven specific "attack vectors." Beyond endpoints and the campus and branches behind the firewall, protection is also needed for mobile devices, email, web applications and the data center. Each of those vectors pose unique threats. As an example, ransomware, malware, spoofing and phishing are common to email, while cloud apps can enable unauthorized users with access to privileged information.

</p>The consequences of leaving a threat vector unprotected are akin to leaving unlocked doors in the rear of a home with hope that no thief would ever think look there. Stolen medical records are in high demand and sell for premium prices on the black market. Available technology enables cybercriminals to easily search for minimally protected environments.

In the quest to steal medical records, cybercriminals are more likely to target small healthcare organizations than large integrated systems. Large and affluent systems have sufficient resources to deploy robust defenses capable of protecting against all threat vectors, while until now, resource constrained organizations were forced to hope they were too small to be worth hacking, while evidence clearly shows them to be at high risk. Lack of adequate defenses has also made smaller organizations vulnerable to Ransomware attacks.