Top Cybersecurity Trends in Healthcare

2023 saw continued growth in adversarial attacks and disruption to healthcare organizations.  We’re going to continue to see this trend as we move into 2024 with some assistance from some additional emerging solutions.  Healthcare organizations need to accelerate their cybersecurity program maturity as the adversary’s roadmap and gameplan is very aggressive.  In addition, being cognizant that nothing in cybersecurity is set it and forget it.  Cybersecurity is ever evolving, requiring analysis, tuning, optimization, integration, and so much more.  Trust in your “value-added” solutions and services partners.  Behind all this healthcare technical infrastructure is human lives that must be protected from the negligence of the adversaries. 

Some notable emerging solutions making headlines and demonstrating value for healthcare moving into 2024…. 

• Secure the Human – social engineering is still crippling organizations.  Cybersecurity is not a departmental responsibility, but something every employee should be aware of.  An individual credential can have a catastrophic blast radius.
• Cyber Risk Quantification (CRQ) – quantification is something we’ve been seeking for decades and longer.  Given the amount of data, threat intelligence and the use of modern machine learning, we can now obtain a better understanding of quantitative risk for a particular organization.  Executives should consider these new offerings as they are having to answer to the board with information readily available within these solutions.
• Enterprise Browsers – with the numerous web-based applications in healthcare, you can’t trust your security to the traditional and commodity browser.  You can better secure your data, users, devices and applications by leveraging an Enterprise Browser that provides your organization with better visibility and control; especially for those employees working from home, smaller remote clinics and accessing shared systems.

In today’s age, where cybersecurity threats are becoming more sophisticated and persistent, it is crucial for healthcare organizations to ensure that they can continue to deliver patient care and protect their patients’ data. Cybersecurity in healthcare encompasses more than just protecting sensitive information. It also includes preventing unauthorized access to information, ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of data, and maintaining the availability of systems and services. 

Overview of Healthcare Cybersecurity

In the healthcare industry, cybersecurity is an essential practice to protect critical systems and sensitive information from digital attacks. Cybersecurity measures are put in place to combat threats against networked systems and applications – whether coming from inside or outside an organization. It is important to have a strong and effective cybersecurity strategy with multiple layers of protection that addresses critical infrastructure, network, device and application security. A comprehensive cybersecurity program can help healthcare organizations identify threats, respond to incidents, and minimize the risk of data breaches. With cyber threats becoming more advanced, healthcare organizations must be proactive and stay vigilant.

Cybersecurity Challenges Faced by Healthcare Organizations

Healthcare organizations collect, store, and process substantial amounts of sensitive data, making them an attractive target for cybercriminals. Organizations must constantly mature their security practices to protect themselves from the latest advanced cyber threats. Their main challenges are to ensure the continuance of patient care, secure medical devices, networks, and data to prevent potential cybersecurity attacks and any potential sensitive data exposure. Below we have outlined some of the top cybersecurity challenging and disrupting trends healthcare organizations are facing. 

• Continuance of Digital Transformation
• Ransomware and Extortion
• Mergers and Acquisitions
• Cloud Adoption
• Skills Shortages
• Telehealth/Telemedicine
• Healthcare Workers Working From Home
• Supply Chain Corruption Concerns
• Explosion of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)
  • Proprietary Hardware and Operating Systems
  • Increase in Sophistication
  • Ubiquitous location use (unmanaged networks)

Top Cybersecurity Solution Trends in Healthcare

Below we have briefly outlined some of the emerging areas in cybersecurity that healthcare organizations are adopting and integrating into their environments and roadmaps for 2023.

• Identity Governance and Administration (IGA)
• Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM)
• Cyber Asset and Attack Surface Management (CAASM)
• External Attack Surface Management (EASM)
• Third Party Risk Management
• Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)
• Zero Trust Architecture
• Extensible Detection and Response (XDR)
• Business Continuity (BC)/Disaster Recovery (DR) Program Development and Maturity
• IoMT Monitoring, Patching and Micro Segmentation
• Security Awareness Training
• Encryption (In-Transit, at Rest, Data (Structured and Unstructured), Email, Endpoint, Cloud)
• Cloud Security (CNAPP, CSPM, CWPP, CASB)
• Professional Services / Managed Services (Especially Managed Detection and Response (MDR)) / Assessments / Staff Augmentation

Conclusion

In today’s ever-evolving technological world, healthcare organizations face enormous challenges in maintaining adequate cybersecurity measures and implementing modern and emerging solutions. With new and more sophisticated threats arising each day, the resilience of ensuring and providing patient care is of paramount importance. We’ve only briefly described some of the top challenges and solutions healthcare clients are engaging on.  If you would like to learn more and go into depth in any of these areas, please reach out to us for a more engaging discussion.