Enhancing Healthcare Cybersecurity: Unlocking PAM’s Potential

The Key Target for Cyber Attacks

The healthcare industry is now facing a complex set of cybersecurity challenges amidst innovation, intensifying regulations, and cost reduction attempts to provide better medical facilities to patients.

Storage of electronically Protected Health Information (ePHI), confidential medical research and insurance details, usage of legacy security infrastructure and the need to run continuous business operations are making healthcare cybersecurity critical.

“System Intrusion, Basic Web Application Attacks and Miscellaneous Errors represent 68% of breaches in the healthcare sector.”

COVID-19 posed unprecedented challenges for healthcare cybersecurity. During the pandemic, hospitals, pharmacies, and other medical entities went for rapid adoption of telehealth and digital health platforms – this led to the further expansion of the attack surface.

Between May 2020 and March 2022, the healthcare industry has the highest average cost of a data breach than any other sector, with a whopping USD 10.1 million.

Recent Attacks on the Healthcare Organizations

Shields Health Care Group

In March of 2022, Shields Health Care Group, a medical imaging service provider based in Massachusetts, disclosed that an unauthorized individual had gained access to their IT systems. As a result, the Protected Health Information (PHI) of over 2 million patients was stolen, including names, addresses, Social Security Numbers, insurance details, and medical histories. This breach had a significant impact due to the company’s association with approximately 50 healthcare providers, leading to the initiation of a class action lawsuit.

Advocate Aurora Health

Advocate Aurora Health, a prominent healthcare organization with 26 hospitals in Wisconsin and Illinois, inadvertently exposed the data of 3 million patients in July 2022. This exposure resulted from improper utilization of a commonly used website tracking tool called Meta Pixel. While Meta Pixel is typically beneficial for understanding user interactions and improving website usability, its implementation on patient portals led to the disclosure of PHI, particularly when users were logged into Facebook or Google simultaneously.

Trinity Health

Trinity Health suffered the most significant consequences among the healthcare organizations affected by the 2020 ransomware attack on Blackbaud.

Blackbaud, a provider of cloud-based customer relationship management software, had one of its self-hosted cloud servers breached, impacting numerous customer organizations worldwide, including over two dozen healthcare organizations.

As a result, more than 10 million records were compromised, including Trinity Health’s donor database. This compromised data contained electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI), encompassing details such as dates of birth, physical locations, email addresses, Social Security Numbers, treatment information, and financial payment data.

The Vulnerabilities Impacting Healthcare Cybersecurity

Beyond compromised confidentiality, lawsuits, and financial and reputational losses, cyber-attacks can slow down several critical medical processes. This can be life-threatening for patients.

So, what vulnerabilities are slowing down the operations and innovations?

Healthcare – The Most Common Victim of Third-Party Breaches

Third-party access is important but risky! The healthcare industry relies on third-party vendors to run most of its operations. Often, these external users need more threat protection plans.

When vendors connect over VPNs via RDP servers, monitoring who is accessing the organization’s endpoints becomes difficult – creating gaps in the security posture. Unsecured third-party vendor communications can impact healthcare cybersecurity significantly.

Cloud Security at Stake

Most healthcare organizations’ data is held on the cloud. Not having comprehensive documentation of cloud assets and improper access management practices can hamper cloud data security.

In this scenario, the industry needs a better strategy to close gaps and block threats at the entry level. Privileged Access Management (PAM) arms organizations with essential tools to thwart cloud risks, manage vendor access and protect critical data.

Addressing Healthcare Cybersecurity Pain Points with Privileged Access Management (PAM)

Privileged Access Management (PAM) helps businesses protect user access to critical information with a multi-layered approach. By implementing a PAM solution, healthcare entities can leverage cutting-edge features to secure multiple areas of their network architecture.

Secure Legacy Devices

Healthcare organizations often rely on a multitude of legacy devices and systems that may lack modern security features and updates. These devices can pose a significant risk if compromised, potentially leading to unauthorized access or data breaches.

PAM solutions offer mechanisms to secure privileged access to these legacy devices by implementing strong authentication controls, monitoring and logging access activities, and enforcing strict access policies. Healthcare organizations can minimize vulnerabilities and protect critical patient data by controlling and auditing privileged access to legacy systems.

Manage and Protect Third-Party Vendor Access

Healthcare organizations frequently collaborate with various third-party vendors, such as medical device manufacturers or IT service providers. While these partnerships bring numerous benefits, they also introduce additional security risks.

PAM solutions help manage and secure privileged access granted to third-party vendors. They enable organizations to establish granular access controls, limit privileges based on specific work requirements, monitor vendor activities, and revoke access when necessary (Just-in-Time Access). By implementing PAM for third-party vendor management, the industry can strengthen healthcare cybersecurity and maintain control over privileged access within their infrastructure.

Comply with HIPAA

Healthcare organizations must adhere to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations to protect patient privacy and data security.

PAM plays a crucial role in achieving HIPAA compliance by providing robust access controls, user authentication mechanisms, and detailed audit trails. These access security solutions enforce the principle of least privilege, ensuring that individuals only have access to the resources necessary to perform their tasks. They also enable organizations to monitor and record privileged access activities, facilitating compliance audits and demonstrating due diligence in protecting patient data.

Prevent Ransomware Attacks

Ransomware attacks pose a significant threat to healthcare organizations, potentially disrupting critical services and compromising patient data. Attackers often target privileged accounts as they provide extensive access to sensitive systems and data like PIIs, EHRs, Insurance data, and medication records.

Having a PAM solution in place offers advanced threat prevention measures, such as just-in-time access, session monitoring, and multi-factor authentication, to protect privileged identities. By implementing PAM, healthcare organizations can significantly reduce the risk of ransomware attacks, detect suspicious activities in real-time, and respond swiftly to mitigate potential damage.

Secure Privileged Identities with Strong User Authentication

User authentication is a fundamental aspect of PAM, ensuring only authorized individuals can access privileged accounts and systems. PAM solutions employ robust authentication methods, such as multi-factor authentication, to verify user identities before granting access. These authentication mechanisms add an extra layer of security to protect against unauthorized access or compromised credentials.

By securing privileged identities through user authentication, healthcare organizations can minimize the risk of insider threats and external breaches.

Sectona’s Privileged Access Management for Upholding Healthcare Cybersecurity

Sectona PAM addresses the needs of healthcare cybersecurity by securing sensitive patient data, mitigating risks associated with legacy devices, managing third-party vendor access, ensuring compliance with HIPAA regulations, and securing privileged identities through strong authentication controls. Furthermore, Sectona PAM offers robust password management by storing privileged accounts’ passwords in an encrypted vault and enabling automated password rotation to prevent credential compromise.

To know more, schedule a 30-minute demo with us.