Tag Archive for: health

We must equip health care professionals with tech resilience

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For weeks, a significant portion of our state has been significantly inconvenienced, even put at risk, by an increasingly disturbing trend. For nearly the entire month of August, Eastern Connecticut Health Network and Waterbury Health, which control several state hospitals and medical offices, have been suffering the effects of a cyberattack that have effectively paralyzed their technological capabilities, shutting down their information technology databases.

These are just some of 25 hospitals across the country that have had their operations impacted through this hack, and the significance of 25 hospitals being unable to provide care to their fullest extent cannot be understated. While treatment of patients is ongoing and emergency departments continue to operate, medical professionals are experiencing significant issues due to lack of connectivity through electronic systems. Local hospitals including Manchester Memorial, Rockville General and Waterbury Hospital cannot offer full outpatient medical imaging or blood drawings, with an unclear deadline or end to the outages. Even urgent care centers under the network have been forced to open alternative phone systems for patient contacts.

The continuing advances of technology in our world, and especially medical technology, have provided new opportunities to improve patient health and provide better outcomes for patients in need. In the current times, our dependency on technology also includes increasing access to remote work, electronic or e-consulting services and electronic multidisciplinary teams, almost universal electronic patients’ medical records, online scheduling, electronic radiologic images and other lab tests, robotic surgeries and remote cardiac monitoring among others. Technology has become the single most critical part of outpatient and inpatient services and communications.

Our increasing reliance on technology also poses significant risks. The current situation reinforces that our systems need more safeguards. This includes recognizing that in general, health service personnel have relatively less experience in working remotely, digital literacy and cybersecurity, leaving the sector…

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Health hackers evolve, AI cyberattacks, NK spooks drills

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Cyber Security Headlines: Week in Review (August 21 - 25, 2023) with guest Gerald Auger Ph.D., chief content creator, Simply Cyber

This week’s Cyber Security Headlines – Week in Review, is hosted by Rich Stroffolino with guest Gerald Auger Ph.D., Chief Content Creator, Simply Cyber

Here are the stories we plan to cover TODAY, time permitting. Please join us live at 12:30pm PT/3:30pm ET by registering for the open discussion on YouTube Live.

Cyber Health Report: Hacker entry point shifts from email to network

We have been covering a growing number of stories on breaches and attacks on hospitals and healthcare systems on Cyber Security Headlines, and yesterday, Critical Insight released its H1 2023 Healthcare Data Cyber Breach Report. Chief among its findings is that “the first six months of the year saw an encouraging decrease in the overall number of data breaches impacting healthcare organizations, it was overshadowed by large-scale breaches resulting in a significant increase in the number of individuals affected, which reached record levels.” The report predicts that 2023 is “on pace to break the record for individuals affected by breaches.” Hacking/IT incidents were the primary cause of breaches, with network server breaches accounting for 97% of records affected, with only 2% due to email breaches. The full report is available at Critical Insight, and a link is available in the show notes to this episode.

(Critical Insight)

Deep Instinct study finds significant increase in Generative AI fueled cyber attacks

Cybersecurity company Deep Instinct today releases its fourth edition of its Voice of SecOps Report, based on research conducted by Sapio Research which surveyed over 650 senior security operations professionals in the US, including CISOs and CIOs. Chief among its findings: “70% of security professionals say generative AI is positively impacting employee productivity and collaboration, with 63% stating the technology has also improved employee morale. However, 75% of security professionals witnessed an increase in attacks over the past 12 months, with 85% attributing this rise to bad actors using generative AI. Nearly half (46%) agree that ransomware is the greatest threat to their organization’s data security and 62% admit that ransomware…

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Ransomware Attack Disrupts Health Care in at Least Three States

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A ransomware attack this week on a California-based health care system forced some of its locations to close and left others to rely on paper records.

The system, Prospect Medical Holdings, which operates 16 hospitals and more than 165 clinics and outpatient centers in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Southern California, announced the cyberattack on Thursday.

A Prospect Medical spokesman could not estimate on Saturday when services would return to normal. It was not immediately clear how many of the system’s sites were affected.

On its website, Eastern Connecticut Health Network, an affiliate of Prospect Medical, listed locations that would be closed until further notice, including a medical imaging center, an urgent care facility and an outpatient blood-draw center, among others.

CharterCARE Health Partners, a Rhode Island affiliate, said on Facebook Thursday that it had to reschedule some of its appointments and to revert to paper records. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that computers were also down at Crozer Health facilities in Delaware County.

“Prospect Medical Holdings, Inc. recently experienced a data security incident that has disrupted our operations,” the company said in a statement on Saturday. “Upon learning of this, we took our systems offline to protect them and launched an investigation with the help of third-party cybersecurity specialists.”

The company said it was focused on “addressing the pressing needs of our patients as we work diligently to return to normal operations as quickly as possible.”

It did not provide details on the nature of the security breach.

Waterbury Hospital, in Waterbury, Conn., said on Saturday that it was continuing to have disruptions. It also said that some of its outpatient and diagnostic imaging services had not been available on Friday or Saturday. On Thursday, it said it was relying on paper records.

Cyberattacks on hospitals have become more common, said John Riggi, senior cybersecurity adviser to the American Hospital Association.

In 2022, One Brooklyn Health, a hospital group that serves low-income neighborhoods in New York, was hit by a cyberattack that also forced staff members to use paper records….

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How to Take a Proactive Approach to DNS Health

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Because DNS is such an omnipresent part of modern networking, it’s easy to assume that functional DNS infrastructure can be left running with minimal adjustments and only needs to be investigated in the event of a malfunction. Yet there are small telltale signs that precede DNS issues—and knowing what they are can help to prevent disruption before it happens.

Networking teams now have access to technology that can provide granular analysis of DNS as needed, enabling a proactive approach to DNS health that detects and fixes problems before causing dreaded downtime. Here are five tips for maximizing DNS performance and what to do in the event that you do find warning signs.

1. Establish What “Normal” Means for Your DNS Servers

There’s no specific amount of DNS traffic that indicates something needs to be addressed. Rather, you can find issues by determining your infrastructure’s specific baseline traffic and then finding anomalies.

Start with obtaining DNS statistics by season and by region, so you have enough context to know whether a trend is abnormal. Also, be sure not to overlook calls to API endpoints, image resources, and other potential destinations that are regularly active but that users are not directly calling. And take the time to establish the average resolver cardinality, or how many resolvers typically query your zones.

From there, you can assess potential threats. If there is a huge spike in DNS queries globally, the chances are high that it’s a DDoS attack. If the spike is more localized, it’s more likely to be an error originating from a specific server in that region. A sudden increase in cardinality is likely a sign of a botnet attack.

2. Find Risks with NXDOMAIN

If you observe an NXDOMAIN response, it means that the DNS record being queried simply doesn’t exist. Typos when entering URLs are inevitable, so some number of NXDOMAIN responses are unavoidable. In fact, according to recent research, about 10% of DNS queries result in an NXDOMAIN response. For an individual company, it’s no concern if that value is 6% or lower. A greater percentage of NXDOMAIN responses should be investigated, especially above 10%.

When trying…

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