Caught In The Crosshairs, Healthcare Organisations Need To Bolster Cybersecurity

Gaurav Agarwal, MD, India & SAARC, Symantec, gives insights on what hospitals and healthcare organisations should be doing differently to proactively manage security risks

The delivery of effective and efficient medical services in hospitals and other healthcare facilities depends as much on the information systems and technologies they use, as on the skills of their doctors and nurses they employ. Many of these systems are linked to each other and to the Internet. Moreover, they store and use medical and personal records of patients. It is therefore essential to protect these systems from being compromised in any manner. Unfortunately, the healthcare industry has proven to be a soft target for cybercriminals. These attackers are capable of stealing confidential data, holding hospitals to ransom, disrupting services or even shutting them down. In 2017, ransomware attacks increased by 89 per cent1 over the previous year, globally. Giving in to such demands is not really an option.

The healthcare industry, as much as any other, needs to be protected by robust cybersecurity systems. And not just because they could face audits or fines; there is much more at stake here. The security teams at hospitals must look beyond bits-and-pieces software solutions and adopt a detailed, uncompromising approach towards cybersecurity, with help from external experts if need be. There’s also the fact that healthcare is an industry with an IT infrastructure that’s more complex and varied than any other. This diversity leads to an interwoven ecosystem of systems and devices, running on many different platforms and with differing security maturity, thus creating dependencies and limitations that make security and change management a rather complex task.