August 27, 2024 3 Minute Read

The healthcare industry's digital transformation has brought unprecedented advancements in patient care. However, it has also introduced new vulnerabilities that put sensitive patient data at risk.

Cybersecurity is no longer an option but a critical component of delivering safe and effective care.

Threat actors have no compunction about taking advantage of this increased threat surface.

The US Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights reported that in 2023, healthcare facilities reported 725 individual data breaches to OCR, with more than 133 million records being exposed or impermissibly disclosed. That translates to more than 364,000 records per day for the entire year, but more important is the human impact, as that number represents thousands upon thousands of patients being impacted. This result ranges from having highly personal data taken and possibly sold online to having medical problems potentially made public, and finally and most dangerous is having facilities shut down or operating below optimum levels, cutting off the people from care when it is most needed.

Trustwave understands the threats facing the healthcare industry and is committed to safeguarding patient information, medical devices, and hospital networks, which in turn, helps to mitigate security risks and increase patient safety.

A healthcare data breach can have devastating consequences. Beyond financial loss and reputational damage, it can directly impact patient safety. Compromised medical records can lead to misdiagnosis, delayed treatment, or even identity theft.

Trustwave's Solution: A Comprehensive Approach

Trustwave offers a robust suite of cybersecurity solutions tailored to the healthcare industry. Our approach focuses on the following key areas:

• Strong Access Controls: Trustwave's identity and access management solutions help healthcare organizations implement stringent access controls, such as Single Sign-On and Multifactor Authentication, ensuring that only authorized personnel can access patient data.
• Penetration Testing: Trustwave’s SpiderLabs team of certified vulnerability, penetration testing, and scenario testing experts work with your security team to identify vulnerabilities and validate your security defenses.
• Database Security: Trustwave’s DbProtect database proactively assesses threats to databases to help you gain visibility into the vulnerabilities in your on-premises or cloud databases that could lead to a data breach. It automates the security of critical data by uncovering vulnerabilities that would-be attackers could exploit, limiting user access to the most sensitive data and alerting on suspicious activities, intrusions and policy violations
• Incident Response Planning: Trustwave's incident response services help healthcare organizations develop and implement comprehensive plans to minimize the impact of a data breach.
• Education: Trustwave Security Colony allows you to get a head start on your security program by accessing solutions to the challenges you face today, as developed by hundreds of peer organizations.

The Power of Emerging Technologies

Trustwave leverages emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance healthcare cybersecurity. Our solutions can detect and respond to threats in real-time, protecting patient data from evolving cyberattacks. In addition, Trustwave’s proprietary Advanced Continual Threat Hunt (ACTH) continuously looks for indicators of behavior and uncovers hidden threats to help you mitigate security risks and finds what other solutions cannot.

ACTH can identify potential insider threats, discover malicious activity that evade detection by modern security controls, stop active threats to your business before damage is done, maximize EDR investment value, uncover hidden and persistent threats to actively reduce your attack surface, and gives the client actionable findings and best-practice remediation recommendations.

Offensive Security’s Role in Healthcare Security

Speaking of being proactive. Trustwave SpiderLabs’ offensive security mindset helps leave no stone unturned regarding security.

In the first case, the team found that a medical device maker recommended users of its EEG device keep the weak default administrator credentials, which could lead to a remote code execution vulnerability.

This issue was uncovered while Trustwave was conducting internal network testing and came across a document titled "XL Security Site Administrator Reference.pdf" for the EEG device. In the document, the manufacturer recommends keeping the weak admin passwords that came with the device, noting that if they were changed in this case, any creation of virtual servers or new database resources would fail.

The second finding was even more severe and possibly led to lives being saved.

After successfully completing a Red Team exercise with an Australian healthcare provider, the client opted for Trustwave to conduct penetration tests of several medical devices, including an insulin pump that patients can take home and connect to their home network, allowing a medical team to monitor and adjust their treatment.

The pentesters found the pump had several vulnerabilities consistent with other Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as poor network segmentation and weak login credentials. These vulnerabilities allowed the team to intercept and manipulate data being transmitted over the wireless network, interfere with the dosage volume and frequency, interrupt the device's general processes, leverage access to the insulin pump to gain access into the patient's home environment and use that access to obtain entry into the hospital's IT environment.

Trustwave instructed the client on how to harden these devices pre-deployment to ensure patient safety.

Researching the Threats Facing the Healthcare Industry

Not only does Trustwave have the proper tools to find threats before they become a problem, but our elite SpiderLabs research team is constantly searching for new threats and then making its findings known to clients and the cybersecurity community at large. SpiderLabs’ recently released Cybersecurity in the Healthcare Industry: Actionable Intelligence for an Active Threat Landscape is a comprehensive roadmap that highlights the attack methodologies employed by threat actors. The report offers valuable insights on how organizations can safeguard themselves against specific types of attacks and sheds light on the evolving and significant threats confronting the healthcare sector, while also providing a detailed analysis of the attack flow utilized by threat groups to execute successful cyberattacks.

Trustwave: Your Partner in Patient Safety

By partnering with Trustwave, healthcare organizations can focus on delivering high-quality patient care while knowing their sensitive data is protected. Our commitment to patient safety is unwavering, and we are dedicated to helping you build a secure healthcare environment.