Implementing Security Countermeasures
Implementing Security Countermeasures
Implementing Security Countermeasures
The healthcare sector has seen a digital change due to the Internet of Medical Things, smart devices, information systems, and cloud services. Life is now much more pleasant due to the advancements made in digital healthcare services, which have made treatment simpler and more accessible. However, both internal and external threats have made the modern healthcare sector the principal victim. Data breaches affect customers, stakeholders, organizations, and enterprises in addition to being a problem and challenge for security specialists. Despite the variety of data breaches, they virtually always have the same effect. This paper discusses implementing security measures for Sutter Health, a healthcare organization in California.
Information to Protect
Adopting electronic health records and other digital platforms organizations use to collect and store information requires implementing security countermeasures. Healthcare organizations must protect electronic health information and patient health information (PHI) by ensuring data privacy and confidentiality (Isola and Yasir 1-3). Protected health information (PHI), also personal health information, is any information a healthcare provider gathers to identify an individual, including demographic data, medical histories, test and laboratory findings, mental health issues, insurance information, and other data (Isola and Yasir 1-3). This information should only be accessed by authorized individuals and shared with the patient’s consent. Failure to follow procedures and regulations violates The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) law.
Impacts of a Security Breach on The Organization
Patient safety risks are the most critical consequences of healthcare data breaches, which can also lead to data theft and reputational and financial damages. However, violations also have serious legal ramifications. According to research, in the days and weeks following a data breach, attorneys for affected patients increasingly filed duplicate lawsuits against healthcare organizations (McKeon 1-2). Given the frequency of breaches in the industry, negligence is a common defense used in data breach cases, according to which an organization should have established stricter security measures to prevent a breach. The HIPAA Breach Notification Rule and other breach notification laws may be violated, as evidenced by most litigations.
Organizations may decide to settle the dispute outside of court even if there was no actual harm caused by the data breach to avoid protracted legal proceedings and high defense costs. Legal risk cannot be completely eliminated, and healthcare businesses may still be vulnerable to data breaches and the ensuing lawsuits even with the most sophisticated security posture (McKeon 1-2). However, HIPAA-covered entities and businesses that store health data can better safeguard themselves while simultaneously protecting patients and minimizing the potential effects of a data leak by concentrating on the areas an organization can control and seeing risk holistically.
Potential Attacks the Organization Can Experience
Criminals on the internet frequently target the healthcare industry. A total of 1,426 attacks per week were made against healthcare companies in 2022, per Check Point Research (CPR). It represents a 60% increase from the previous year and a huge number of the year’s most significant attacks targeted healthcare institutions (Kost 2). Ransomware is a frequent and costly risk to healthcare organizations, with about one out of every 42 healthcare businesses falling victim to a ransomware assault in the third quarter of 2022. The most common cybersecurity threat in healthcare is phishing. Phishing is inserting harmful links into a seemingly innocent email, the most typical phishing type (Pranggono and Abdullahi 69-70). Phishing emails sometimes refer to a well-known medical condition to encourage link-clicking. They can appear very convincing. Data breaches are also a threat, and comparatively speaking, the healthcare sector experiences a disproportionately high number of data breaches. In the healthcare industry, there were 1.76 data breaches on average every day in 2020 (Kost 5). HIPAA lays forth stringent rules for preventing unauthorized access to sensitive information, such as health records, but many health organizations struggle to put its security controls into practice, leaving holes that serve as entry points for cybercriminals (Pranggono and Abdullahi 69-70). A distributed denial-of-service is another attack involving flooding a targeted server with bogus connection requests to take it offline. This coordinated attack uses a large number of endpoints and IoT devices that have been forcibly recruited into a botnet through malware infection.
(Implementing Security Countermeasures)
Counter Measures
Along with adhering to HIPAA requirements and local medical regulations, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) created a framework for enhancing critical infrastructure cybersecurity in response to requests from the American Hospital Association and other healthcare-related organizations for enterprise network risk management. Additionally, based on the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF), HHS established Health Industry Cybersecurity Practices (HICP) for the healthcare sector, which outlines the cybersecurity threats and mitigation strategies the sector must employ (Mavis 8). Adopting endpoint protection solutions that support operational security via operation lock, USB device lock, data lock, and configuration settings lock, which can fully safeguard intricate and numerous endpoints in healthcare operations, is one of these strategies. Asset management by adopting inspection scanning and clean-up solutions like Trend Micro Portable Security 3 Pro (TMPS3) is another countermeasure that helps mitigate the probability or threat of malicious code being introduced into the system. This solution generates comprehensive details about the scanned assets, helping identify any security threats (Mavis 9-11). Thirdly, a healthcare organization can adopt network management solutions such as Intrusive Prevention Systems (IPS) that control customer connections and content transmissions between the equipment in the network, ensuring no unauthorized devices can establish a connection or transmit content (Mavis 12-14). These strategies are some solutions to data security issues affecting healthcare organizations.
Work Cited
Isola, Sasank, and Yasir Al Khalili. “Protected Health Information.” StatPearls [Internet]. StatPearls Publishing, (2022): 1-3.
Kost, Edaward. “Biggest Cyber Threats in Healthcare (Updated for 2022).” Third-Party Risk and Attack Surface Management Software | UpGuard, (9 Nov. 2022): 2-7. http://www.upguard.com/biggest-cyber-threats-in-healthcare.
Mavis. “Potential Threats to Healthcare Ecosystems.” TXOne Networks, (7 Oct. 2022): 8-14. www.txone.com/potential-threats-to-healthcare-ecosystems/.
McKeon, Jill. “Key Ways to Manage the Legal Risks of a Healthcare Data Breach.” Health IT Security, (13 Oct. 2022): 1-2. http://healthitsecurity.com/features/key-ways-to-manage-the-legal-risks-of-a-healthcare-data-breach#.
Pranggono, Bernardi, and Abdullahi Arabo. “COVID‐19 pandemic cybersecurity issues.” Internet Technology Letters 4.2 (2021): e69-70.
