Modern Healthcare recently reported that “Health insurer Centene Corp. is hunting for six computer hard drives containing the personally identifiable health records of about 950,000 individuals…” While this potential data loss doesn’t come close to the monumental data breaches suffered by Anthem, Blue Cross and Blue Shield and others in 2015; it highlights 5 actions that companies of any size in the healthcare space should be taking now to optimize security.
5 Actions You Should Take to Improve Security
1: Manage and Encrypt Assets
Know what you own, who it’s assigned to and if it’s mobile encrypt it. Wrap these efforts into your existing Governance, Risk, and Compliance efforts for HIPAA Hitech, PCI DSS and any other relevant business requirements around compliance. As a goal measure once, comply many but whatever you do encrypt and track your endpoints.
2: Manage Your Vulnerabilities
Establish a capability to assess the risk of systems, applications, and IT services by evaluating the prevalence of vulnerabilities in your environment. You won’t ever be able to remediate them all but you don’t have to. Focus on the high risk/high probability first and establish a documented, repeatable program to continually address this basic requirement for IT security.
3: Privileged Access Management
Monitor and manage your privileged accounts as these will be the accounts likely exploited in a successful breach. Ignoring this accepted minimum standard of care for information security is akin to not encrypting laptops, it’s a necessity, not a luxury. For further explanation, we discuss privileged account exploitation more in-depth in our white paper, CyberSheath APT Privileged Exploitation.
4: Protect the Network
Provide protection for your network environment with a set of network security tools to detect, alert, and automatically respond to malicious activities targeting your environment. Prioritize requirements here to fit your budget and make tradeoffs were required to include protection for internally and externally available systems, email platforms, and internet use via browser.
5: Incident Response, Logging, and Monitoring
Build a capability to monitor critical systems, applications, and IT services as well as to detect and respond to incidents and/or breaches when information is improperly handled, accessed, or transmitted as it inevitably will be at some point. Do what you can with what you have as not everyone can afford 24/7 monitoring. Outsource where necessary but do not get caught with no plan or capability or you will spend exponentially more being reactive.
How Can CyberSheath Help Your Organization?
All of these efforts can and should be integrated with the day-to-day delivery of IT operations to maximize your efficiency and effectiveness. CyberSheath will work with your organization, large or small, to help secure your valuable assets. CyberSheath offers security assessments to help your organization begin with a clear understanding of where you stand in regards to industry standards and regulations.