In a recent article, our team at Forvis Mazars outlined the top five cybersecurity risks facing the healthcare industry: ransomware attacks, phishing and social engineering, medical device vulnerabilities, insider threats, and third-party risk. As these risks continue to advance, potentially affecting your organization's protected health information, it’s important to consider how your healthcare system can implement the following.
1. Ransomware Assessment
Ransomware attacks continue to be one of the most prevalent and ongoing problems within the healthcare industry.1 With a ransomware assessment, our team can exploit vulnerabilities, see how well your organization’s procedures are able to defend an attack, and help mitigate those risks. This assessment can help an organization identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover from a ransomware attack. Our team has helped healthcare systems protect against and prepare for unforeseen ransomware attacks.
2. Security Awareness & Social Engineering Test
Phishing and social engineering attacks are common in the healthcare industry. These attacks manipulate employees to give up private information, leading to the release of sensitive information. Social engineering testing can provide insights on best practices healthcare employees can use to help increase security, ultimately keeping patient data top of mind.
3. Threat & Vulnerability Test
Through ethical hacking, our team applies tools and techniques used by hackers, identity thieves, and disgruntled employees to exploit and analyze security issues through a variety of testing and scanning. As medical devices become more connected to networks and the internet, it’s important to confirm your system has strong security controls in place.
4. Incident Response Plan
Reducing downtime is critical to patient care for a healthcare’s IT system. Forvis Mazars can help you reduce risk with an incident response plan. Whether intentional or not, it’s important to have a plan in place in case a patient data breach occurs or if clinical systems are not available.
5. Third-Party Risk Assessment
Analyzing vendor contracts and independent assessments are two important focus areas for a healthcare system as it assesses and manages third-party cyber risk. Your vendors maintaining effective cyber control is critical to the success of a cyber risk program. Enlisting our cybersecurity professionals to assist with third-party risk assessment can help your organization identify your vendors’ security risks, including the compromise and disruption of patient care systems.
Cyber risks will continue to be an ongoing threat. However, by contacting our cybersecurity professionals, you can put in place various tools and procedures to help mitigate those risks. From medical devices to third-party vendors, cybersecurity should be top of mind to continue giving patients top-notch quality care. Given the actions above, which ones will your healthcare system put into place to help mitigate these threats?
If you have any questions or need assistance, please reach out to a professional at Forvis Mazars or submit the Contact Us form below.
- 1Verizon 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report