Page 130 - CDM-CYBER-DEFENSE-eMAGAZINE-December-2018

According to the Verizon’s 2018 Protected Health Information Data Breach Report (PHIDBR), 70% of
incidents involving malicious code were ransomware infections and a whopping 58% of incidents involved
insiders.

While an internal breach could be just employee curiosity and may not always be malicious, it leaves
sensitive data open to misuse. Unauthorized internal access to patients’ personal information provides a
convenient means to commit fraud of various types. Regardless of the intent of the breach, securing data
should be of prime concern to any healthcare organization.

Taking a Zero Trust Approach to Security

Most healthcare organizations have traditional cyber security systems which rely on protecting the
perimeter using firewalls, while assuming all communication within the network is safe and authorized.

Threat actors are taking advantage of this assumption and using sophisticated attack vectors – like
phishing, fileless malware, ransomware, zero day attacks – to enter the network. Once inside, they’re
able to remain undetected for months since security operators have very little visibility of East-West traffic.
Apart from hackers, the high percentage of internal threats from employees is also looming security
concern.

In the event of a breach, a healthcare organization stands to lose not only their patients’ personal and
financial details but also private and sensitive data like:

 Medical history
 Social Security/National Insurance numbers
 Medical device or serial numbers
 Biometric data
 Full facial photographic images or images that have unique identifying characteristics
 X-rays and diagnostic images
To defend against external and internal threats, the most reliable course of action is to implement a zero
trust security architecture. The zero trust security concept is based on the premise that no connection is
trusted unless it has been explicitly allowed.

Adopting zero trust security marks a paradigm shift from reactive to proactive security, wherein the goal
is to prevent the breach rather than ‘react’ after it has happened.

How Zero Trust Security Can Make a Difference

To create a zero trust network, healthcare organizations cannot depend only on network level
segmentation which uses VLAN/ACLs and internal firewalls. Maintaining access control lists and updating
thousands of firewall rules on a regular basis in a dynamic business environment is cumbersome,
operations-intensive, and error-prone – not to mention the high cost of maintenance and upgrades. Lack
of East-West traffic visibility is also a major issue with hardware centric segmentation.

130