Safety first: Protecting patients and data

Chapter 4

Chapter 4:

Safety first:
Protecting patients and data

Every day, thousands of new medical devices are connecting to the network. Take a minute to picture the amount of data these devices are generating, transferring, and storing in addition to data from the EHR, clinical workstations, and smart hospital applications. All of that data needs protecting.

What used to be the realm of science fiction is now real. Hackers might use an unprotected infusion pump on the network as a gateway to your hospital’s data. A staff member might unknowingly download a malicious PDF attachment from an email. Or perhaps a virus has been lurking undetected in your network for some time.

The future of healthcare is evolving into a new era where nearly everything is connected, resulting in a threat surface that has no borders. Until recently, the impact of cyber incidents was primarily financial, but now threat actors and sophisticated ransomware are significantly disrupting hospital operations.

Protect the patients and data that matter most.

How can we prepare before an attack?

Identify:

It’s hard to protect something if you don’t know what or where it is.

To understand the risks to systems, assets, data, and capabilities, you need visibility into what is on your network, who is using network-connected devices, when network access is requested, and where the request is coming from.

Protect:

Deploying safeguards against inevitable cyberattacks is crucial.

Protection can include everything from enforcing access control to managing data confidentiality. Firewalls are foundational to having the industry’s most complete and open security platform. With world-class security controls, consistent policy and visibility, and the ability to integrate network and security, your healthcare organization can reduce costs and complexity.

Protect the patients and data that matter most.

How do we react during an attack?

Detect:

Many cybersecurity incidents go unnoticed for months, giving hackers ample time to explore your networks, locate sensitive information, and slowly and carefully extract it.

Get global threat intelligence, advanced sandboxing, and real-time malware blocking to help prevent breaches in your healthcare organization. But because you can’t rely on prevention alone, you need the tools to continuously analyze file activity across your extended network, so you can quickly detect, contain, and remove advanced malware.

Know who and what is on the network and exactly what is happening in real-time using telemetry from your network infrastructure. Detect advanced threats and respond to them quickly. Protect critical data with smarter network segmentation. And do it all with an agent-less solution that grows with your healthcare organization.

Respond:

The ability to respond to an attack is a bit like an insurance policy:

No one ever wants to use it, but you have to have it when disaster strikes. You may have suffered a breach already but simply haven’t discovered it yet.

Analyze the effects and spread of advanced malware for fast response. See which systems have been affected, how deep the malware has gone, and what steps you can take to recover quickly. Quarantine malicious code to protect other systems from infection.