Let me be frank. There is no silver bullet solution that will make your hospital impenetrable to cyberattacks. Every chief information security officer (CISO) I’ve chatted with in the past few months agree 100%. Silver bullets simply don’t work. This type of approach doesn’t take into account all of the angles and all of the space in which cybersecurity needs to protect.
As security analysts continue to get inundated with alerts, not to mention calls from upper management every single time a major security event happens (which I might add has continued to rise—especially in rural healthcare), security experts are looking for ways to better invest the few resources they have to make better use of technology, people and process.
The secret to making security work in 2018 and beyond for healthcare? Collaboration.
Just as rural hospitals have recognized a growing need to collaborate with larger urban hospitals and universities through Telehealth networks, so too, experts in healthcare IT for rural populations have identified an increasing need for collaboration to better protect critical infrastructure within hospital networks.
Collaboration hold one key to improved time to detection and response, so teams can better address concerns that permeate the organization when a large-scale attack occurs. But more importantly, they are better-equipped to handle daily streams of threats before they become those large-scale attacks.
Unfortunately, most healthcare organizations do not utilize collaboration effectively. The main reason stems from what collaboration means. It’s a rather vague concept, making it extremely difficult to figure out an effective way to implement it…
One thing is clear. We do know who should be engaged in security. IT Support, Security Operations Centers (SOCs), Endpoint and Network detection teams, Incident Response teams, Risks Management, Vulnerability management, the list of experts goes on. Each of these teams should be able to collaborate together within a team.
The problem in rural healthcare is that most hospitals cannot find teams equipped to do everything—that’s where collaboration is critical. By having a sidekick security team that is helping you with expert analysis day in day out, meeting your compliance needs, but more importantly protecting your patient data, is paramount. Collectively, as a cohesive collaborating unit, a team of teams consisting of expertise in each of the aforementioned areas makes your security stronger. They work with your users to identify how to implement solutions that won’t be worked around. They integrate security into your team’s culture and help establish an environment of safety (a feeling critical in hospital environments).
How to collaborate is the next hurdle. We typically define collaboration as the action of working with someone to produce something. But there’s a second definition, which is a bit more passive—the act of sharing information that at some point will further another person’s work. I think both definitions are critical to cybersecurity.
Active collaboration—this form of collaboration is engaging one person to accomplish something with someone else. This is often exceedingly for security experts to do because its time consuming for busy professionals to see eye to eye with people with different experts—especially if their focus is not on rural healthcare. Often, when experts address unfocussed problems of simply cybersecurity collaboration fails when investigations take longer than expected or when dead ends or roadblocks or even misinformation is hard to crack through.
What’s needed is a collaborative environment threading threat data, evidence and users together, so all members understand what the final goal of the collaboration is. By having a goal, they are able to divide and conquer, rather working by committee, focused on their individual contributions to the bigger puzzle. Active collaboration that efficiently uses expert time helps to make investigations or preventative strategic implementations more cost effective for your hospital and makes sure that projects actually get done, rather than getting tabled after a roadblock pops up.
Your hospital should be thinking about who you engage for security and how to work with experts efficiently—usually in some sidekick capacity to ensure your hospital is safe and in the hand of people that know how to protect hospitals from ransomware and cyberattacks.
Passive collaboration—the heart of passive collaboration is information sharing. Often, one expert researches a concern and then sends out the alert to everyone else. Instead of expecting everyone to be on top of every latest detail, when there are security concerns, one subject expert is able to boil down the important stuff, along with instructions on how to prevent or remediate incidents.
In rural health, having passive collaboration goes a long way for IT Directors, since small staffed teams can rarely keep up on every aspect of security in addition to the full plate of IT work they’re demanded to keep up with.
With a central repository of documentation that contains information on your most likely threats (data-driven threat analyses) will best inform your hospital leadership on how to invest your limited resources and budget to best protect patient data.
With passive collaboration, experts help IT Support teams stay informed on latest threats, provide solutions with biggest impact on protecting data systems to enable IT Directors to make hard decisions on how and where to invest time, effort and resources. Collaboration is invaluable to keeping cybersecurity relevant, rather than obsolete.
The problem is that most hospitals fail to have a collaborative team to ensure a secure network. Rather, every single vendor has its own opinions (and agenda) in pulling you and your IT Support teams in different directions, resulting in wasted money invested in insecure solutions.
One easy way to figure out how secure your network is?
Security experts often recommend vulnerability assessments. We recommend getting a ransomware vulnerability assessment because it tackles the ever changing complexity of security.
