Top 10 Best-Known Cybersecurity Incidents and What to Learn from Them
Negligent or malicious actions of those who have legitimate access to your systems can be more devastating to your company than efforts of outside attackers.
The challenge
The healthcare industry has become one of the most attractive targets for cybercriminals, forcing medical services providers to overcome many challenges.
Protecting sensitive personal and health information
Preventing, mitigating, and investigating insider threats
Increasing visibility into how medical staff interact with health records
Complying with data privacy and security regulations and laws
Ensuring secure cooperation with third-party contractors and remote staff
Providing secure access to data from health trackers and medical devices
How insider threats can harm healthcare institutions
Breaches of PHI
Insider threats may result in unauthorized access to patients’ protected health information (PHI). Malicious actors may exploit the compromised data for identity theft, medical fraud, or other illegal activities.
Operational disruptions
As a result of insider threats, healthcare organizations often face the loss of critical data, service outages, and poor productivity that lead to negative business outcomes, such as revenue losses.
Compromised care
The compromised integrity of patients’ PHI and operational inefficiency of healthcare entities caused by insider threats may hamper the course of treatment and put patients’ safety and health at risk.
Regulatory penalties
PHI compromise can be viewed as a violation of industry regulations (e.g. HIPAA) and can lead to penalties for an organization that fails to prevent or sufficiently respond to insider threats.
Reputational damage
Negative publicity surrounding insider security incidents can damage the organization’s reputation and make it difficult to attract and retain patients and staff.
Financial losses
Altogether, hefty non-compliance fines, compensation and recovery costs, impaired business operations, and lost business opportunities can lead to significant financial losses for healthcare entities.
Establishing effective insider threat prevention for healthcare providers is crucial if you are to avoid these and other negative consequences of insider threats. Ekran System can help minimize insider risks in your healthcare organization and provide a sufficient level of health data protection.
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Ekran System enables healthcare organizations to
Prevent the loss of sensitive data
Ensure sufficient protection of PHI to prevent data breaches.
Comply with security requirements
Facilitate implementation of cybersecurity practices required by laws and industry guidelines.
Mitigate insider threats proactively
Track insider behavior to prevent security incidents and collect evidence for investigations.
Get a 360-degree view of user activity in the network
Control who uses your network and for what purposes and keep an eye out for suspicious activity.
Top-notch healthcare cybersecurity risk management solutions
Healthcare facilities and healthtech companies
Pharma manufacturers and the biotech sector
Equipment and device manufacturers
Secure access to critical endpoints to prevent PHI and intellectual property theft.
Limit and manage employee and partner access to critical data assets.
Monitor how employees and third-party vendors handle sensitive patient data.
Ensure compliance and strengthen your defense against insider threats.
Industry recognition
Get a practical guide to protecting healthcare data
Healthcare industry cybersecurity and data protection: how to protect patients’ health information
Find out how to secure your patients’ sensitive data, learn about the causes and costs of data breaches in healthcare, and discover the most common vulnerabilities of electronic health record systems.
Download White PaperHow Ekran System can help healthcare organizations
Deploying healthcare cybersecurity solutions is an efficient way for healthcare entities to overcome security challenges and enhance the security of sensitive medical information. Here’s how Ekran System’s features can help you ensure the privacy and security of medical information:
See how your employees handle patients’ sensitive data and your organization’s commercial secrets. Ekran System allows you to record user activity in a screen capture format alongside informative metadata, providing you with valuable insights for security incident investigations.
Establish secure user authorization and prevent the wrong people from accessing sensitive data. Ekran System’s multi-factor authentication and secondary authentication capabilities enable you to efficiently validate user identities on personal and shared accounts.
Reduce risks of data breaches caused by users accessing your critical assets from outside your network. Leverage Ekran System’s capabilities to set granular access permissions and monitor the activity of telecommuters, third-party vendors, and outsourced service providers.
Receive immediate notifications about unusual user behavior and suspicious activity. Ekran System lets healthcare organizations use predefined or custom notifications and configure automated responses to eliminate cybersecurity incidents as quickly as possible.
Keep an eye out for potential threats with regular security audits. Ekran System integrates with Microsoft Power BI, allowing you to have all the necessary data at your fingertips for the detection and thorough analysis of any security violations.
Ensure secure privileged access to critical endpoints within your healthcare organization. Ekran System enables you to grant and limit privileges to make sure that patients’ sensitive data is only available to those who really need it for work.
Monitor employee and vendor activity with no risk to their private data. Ekran System removes personal identifiers from activity records to help you protect users’ personal information and comply with privacy requirements. If needed for incident investigation, data can easily be re-identified.
Get more with enterprise-grade insider threat detection software
Visually structured evidence trail resulting in low incident response time
Context-rich recordings significantly reduce CERT and SOC response times. One-click search across suspicious activity makes investigations faster and more effective.
AI-based compromised account detection
Cybercriminals are constantly improving their ways of compromising privileged accounts. Powered by artificial intelligence, the Ekran UEBA system can detect a hacker who has penetrated a corporate system using stolen credentials.
Lightweight software agent and highly optimized formats for storing data
The lightweight agent works silently and isn’t noticeable to users or other programs. Collected data is saved in searchable and highly optimized video, audio, and text file formats for compact log storage and easy reporting.
Active in your environment in 20 minutes or less
Ekran System is quick to install and easily integrates with SIEM and ticketing systems. You’ll get a ready-to-use solution right after a coffee break.
Why companies choose Ekran System®
Ekran System continuously monitors various endpoints, including both end-user machines and servers, within any network architecture. Being one of the best user activity monitoring tools for Windows, Ekran also works for macOS and is a powerful Linux/UNIX session audit tool. It even supports X Window and all popular virtualization solutions. Ekran allows agent-based and jump server-based deployments as well as any combination thereof.
Designed for tracking user activity on tens of thousands of endpoints, Ekran System demonstrates exceptional stability and performance. As for maintenance and reliability, the platform provides high availability and multi-tenant deployment, system resource and health monitoring dashboards, and automated maintenance tasks.
Besides tracking user activity, Ekran System provides enhanced incident alerting and response functionality. But that’s not all. Using Ekran System Client, you can set up access and identity management. Since Ekran System also provides server user activity monitoring, you always know what is happening in your network.
The unique licensing offered by Ekran System enables cost-effective deployments of any size, from small pilots to enterprise projects. Floating endpoint licensing enables license reassignment in a couple of clicks. For virtual environments, this process is automated.
Featured healthcare industry case studies
Case study
European Healthcare Provider AGEL Protects Sensitive Data from Insider Threats Using Ekran System
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Healthcare Organization Ensures HIPAA Compliance and Efficient Remote Work with Ekran System
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FAQ
Healthcare organizations can secure patient data, including protected health information (PHI), by following security best practices. These include implementing data encryption measures, strict access controls, strong authentication policies, and data backup procedures, among others. Deploying healthcare cybersecurity solutions like insider risk management platforms, privileged access management tools, user activity monitoring solutions, and data loss prevention systems can also enhance data protection efforts in healthcare organizations.
Yes, there are various regulations specific to the healthcare industry. Examples include the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the US, the Health Information Privacy Code (HIPC) in New Zealand, and the Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA) in Ontario, Canada. Healthcare entities need to check the legislation of the regions they operate in to know what regulations they must comply with.
A dedicated healthcare cybersecurity solution can help a healthcare organization comply with the security requirements required by industry-specific laws and regulations.
Hackers target healthcare due to the high value of sensitive patient data, which includes personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI). They often use such data for identity theft, insurance fraud, and other criminal activity. Additionally, the critical nature of healthcare services makes institutions more likely to pay ransoms and presents attractive opportunities for cybercriminals seeking monetary gain.
Deploying healthcare security solutions can help healthcare organizations protect sensitive information from hackers.
Effectively detecting and responding to cybersecurity incidents requires healthcare enterprises to have a comprehensive incident response program (IRP) in place. We suggest establishing an IRP in accordance with the guidelines from NIST by taking the following steps:
- Establish an incident response team
- Plan all incident response procedures in advance
- Monitor user activity
- Take care of backups and recovery strategies
- Update the IRP regularly.
To enhance the effectiveness of your IRP, consider deploying a dedicated healthcare security solution, such as Ekran System.
Employee training and awareness is crucial for healthcare data security. Cybersecurity awareness training ensures that the staff understands security protocols, the importance of following them, and key indicators of potential threats. Regular employee training also reduces the risk of human error, such as the accidental disclosure of sensitive data or falling victim to social engineering attacks.
Ready to strengthen your defenses with Ekran System?
Consult our experts on the most efficient insider risk management approach to meet your organization’s cybersecurity needs.
