The healthcare sector was a lucrative target for hackers in 2016, and unfortunately 2017 doesn’t appear to be any different. According to “The Identity Theft Resource Center,” 238 healthcare breaches have been reported so far this year.
The most noticeable breach regarding the numbers of patient records impacted was a ransomware attack in Women’s Healthcare Group of Pennsylvania, cited by the HIPAA Breach Reporting Tool website. In this one incident, some 300,000 patient records were breached, giving unauthorized access to protected health information.
If you are a healthcare provider, you may be thinking what on earth you can do to avoid joining the thousands of other healthcare organizations who have already been compromised. With so much sensitive data to protect, and often little budget to work with, the outlook may seem bleak.
There is light at the end of the tunnel though. There are many steps you can take to bolster your defenses against hackers and stop attacks before they become damaging.
Early Warning Signs
Early warning signs every healthcare organization must pay heed to:
- Unusual pop-ups displaying on computers
- Computers running slower than usual
- Social media posts from friends, especially those asking an employee to click on a video or a post
- Emails or texts messages from unsolicited and unknown sources
An important part of formulating a reliable disaster recovery plan involves introducing an automated IT solution that identifies vulnerabilities and secures your network boundaries.
I suggest you use LepideAuditor, an award-winning IT auditing solution. It’s easy to deploy, gives you tons of insight and is also surprisingly cheap!
Let me show you how LepideAuditor helps identify and fill the gaps in the IT environment of healthcare organizations; ensuring the protection of confidential patient data from dark web services.
LepideAuditor: Transforming IT security in the health industry
1. Audit permissions to access health data
In the event of a security breach, hackers are most likely to alter critical IT objects permissions to make unauthorized access to protected health data, resulting in data leakage or identity theft. As a safety measure, LepideAuditor guarantees a method for detecting when permission changes are taking place so that you have a record of who accessed your sensitive patient health data.
2. Spot unauthorized access to sensitive health data
Unauthorized access to the network can be difficult to detect without an auditing solution in place. However, LepideAuditor proactively and continuously audits accesses to files, folders, Exchange Server Mailboxes, Active Directory objects, Group Policies and more.
3. Get a bird’s-eye view of your whole IT environment
By giving you push-notifications for the real-time and threshold alerts sent straight to your mobile devices; LepideAuditor enables you to get an overview of the health and security of your environment wherever you are. The solution lets you configure alerts to correlate events based on threshold conditions or anomalous activities, to ensure complete visibility.
4. Generate HIPAA compliance reports
HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is the standard for ensuring that sensitive patient data is protected by all means. HIPAA requires you to ensure all physical, network and process security measures are in place and duly followed. LepideAuditor generates predefined HIPAA reports that meet the Privacy and Security Rules depicted in the compliance and ensure the security of the electronic health data of your organizations.
5. Monitor group memberships
Occasionally, permissions will be assigned to users through groups. Any sudden changes in group memberships can, therefore, be potentially dangerous; leading to unnecessary privileges awarded to users. LepideAuditor identifies diverse group memberships and informs you of every change made to group properties or memberships in real-time.
6. Backup and restore
In situations where an unwanted or unauthorized change has taken place, it’s important that you can reverse these changes after identifying them. With LepideAuditor’s proprietary backup snapshot technology, you can roll back changes with a few clicks using the Lepide Object Restore Wizard.
Takeaway: Be proactive not reactive
As attackers have a variety of methods for breaking into the network of healthcare organizations, the IT department need to adopt a proactive approach to defend and combat whenever security vulnerabilities surface.
So, high up on your to-do-list should be to schedule a demo today.. See how it can fit seamlessly into your security protocols and help you comply with regulations like HIPAA.
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