The Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) and Deloitte Advisory Cyber Risk Services, in coordination with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), recently conducted a cyberattack simulation in the healthcare industry to gauge the readiness of each organization’s cyber incident response plans. The results of the simulation reveal that current incident response plans in healthcare are inadequate in preventing data breaches. The simulation revealed a number of actions that can be taken to improve incident readiness and overall resilience.
The HITRUST CyberRX 2.0 Health Plan exercise (CyberRX) gathered 250 individuals from 12 health plans in the first simultaneous cyberattack simulation exercise undertaken in the industry. As detailed in the HITRUST CyberRX After Action Report, the simulation revealed many specific oversights in security preparedness that are common across many industries, including:
As the report indicates, “It is no longer a matter of ‘if,’ but ‘when,’ an organization will be breached in healthcare,” so actions such as this simulation can provide valuable information about specific risk points for your organization. As Ray Biondo, chief information security officer at Health Care Services Corporation notes, “Cyberattacks can strike with little forewarning and unfold in ways that no one can predict. There’s no such thing as a pre-scripted response, but every time an organization practices incident response, they get better at anticipating the issues they may face."
There is no denying that cyber attacks are on the rise, though that fact alone can skew security preparedness. Cyber attacks imply a brute force attack against a network, when the reality is that the source of the attack can come from any point. The attack surface is now comprised of millions of access points that extend beyond the corporate network, thanks to the many devices used by employees and the use of the cloud. People are the indirect source of most security incidents, compromising data or passwords or network access intentionally or by mistake. The endpoint is a growing source of many of these errors.
As part of your preparedness, we provide Absolute DDS for Healthcare, a comprehensive onboarding program which pairs the highest level of endpoint security with expert forensic support to respond to and contain security incidents. With Absolute DDS, you can set policy-based actions to identify suspicious changes to software, hardware or user behaviour, with automated actions to ensure that data on the endpoint is protected. Learn more at Absolute.com