7 ways to prevent healthcare ransomware attacks
These tips can keep your practice safe from ransomware, hackers and other bad actors.
Healthcare organizations need visibility into their operations and an understanding of the underlying risks. Specifically, knowing who has access to what and identifying where the most sensitive data allows the organization to establish additional controls that are necessary to maintain operations.
When ransomware attacks impact patient care or practice operations, a backup strategy enables rapid, effective recovery as well as additional protection. Choosing and implementing a system which delivers continuity. A durable copy of data must always be available.
Delivering patches should be a priority when new vulnerabilities are discovered in clinical and business applications, medical devices, and other patient care and delivery systems. When these vulnerabilities are identified, updates should be automated, and patches should be distributed to third-party applications known to be impacted.
Regular reviews of access are especially important with critical assets which can impact business or patient care. Performing reviews can ensure that the access to these assets remains restricted.
With every employee at risk of receiving one of these attacks, they must all be provided with cybersecurity awareness training consistently reinforced with timely threat information. Responsible behavior can prevent ransomware attacks from being successful.
Using new systems, purpose-built for the unique demands of healthcare, can lower a healthcare facilities risk in ways that spreadsheets and text documents cannot.
Communicating with trusted personnel at other healthcare organizations and threat intelligence organizations can help an organization be proactive against known or existing threats and vulnerabilities. Sharing information can provide confidence in the intelligence and increase resiliency.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a sea change in the realm of remote employment, but that’s opened the door to hackers attempting to take advantage of the situation.
One of these bad actors’ chief tools is ransomware. These kind of attacks have been on the rise over the past few years, and in the last year alone have impacted 34 percent of healthcare organization.
These attacks are more than just annoying for the healthcare organizations targeted, they can also have a severe impact on patients. An analysis from September found that 22 percent of healthcare providers hit with a ransomware attack reported an increase in mortality rate tied to the attack.
A new whitepaper from health IT company Censinet lays out tips which can help practices protect themselves from these bad actors. See the slideshow for details.
