Info Risk Today Podcast

In her first interview since joining the HHS Office for Civil Rights as deputy director of health information privacy, Deven McGraw describes plans to relaunch HIPAA compliance audits next year and outlines other priorities.

Four years after the FFIEC issued its updated authentication guidance, many banking institutions say account takeover losses have gone up, a new survey shows. John LaCour of PhishLabs explains why institutions' reactive approach to fraud is failing.

FDA official Suzanne Schwartz, M.D., expects more medical device security vulnerabilities to come to light in the year ahead. The FDA soon will issue new guidance addressing the cybersecurity of medical devices already in use.

In the wake of hacker attacks, which have left healthcare providers uncertain about what security steps to take, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is working to help organizations sort out role-based identity and access management issues, says ONC's privacy officer, Lucia Savage.

More hackers are exploiting remote-access and network vulnerabilities, rather than installing malware to invade networks and exfiltrate data, says Dell SecureWorks' researcher Phil Burdette. That's why conventional breach-detection tools aren't catching the intrusions.

Government agencies used to be the top attack target, as well as the top source of threat intelligence. How did the private sector turn the tables, and what can government do to improve? Rapid7's Wade Woolwine offers insight.

Cybersecurity adviser Patricia Titus, a former CISO, says too many women are leaving the information security field for jobs with less pressure and more work schedule flexibility. So she urges organizations to offer more incentives to attract and retain women in the field.

If malware infections and data breaches are inevitable, then why should organizations even try to be proactive? Isn't a reactive stance more appropriate? Not so, says Marcin Kleczynski, CEO of Malwarebytes.

When it comes to healthcare payments, fraud tends to come in two flavors: Organized and opportunistic. What are the biggest gaps in detecting and preventing these schemes? IBM's Robert McGinley shares insight.

The bad news is that the new KeyRaider malware has so far compromised more than 225,000 Apple accounts worldwide. The good news, according to Ryan Olson of Palo Alto Networks, is that only modified, or "jailbroken," ioS devices are at risk.

Cybersecurity risks to medical devices will become an even more critical issue for healthcare organizations to address next year because of the need to maintain patient trust, says Rob Potter of Symantec.

Underground cybercrime forums continue to evolve, offering services ranging from cybercrime toolkits and money laundering to bulletproof hosting and a service that reviews exfiltrated data for corporate secrets, says cybersecurity analyst Tom Kellermann of Trend Micro.

In preparing business associate agreements, healthcare organizations should demand a right-to-audit clause and copies of vendors' current security policies as proof that the companies are taking appropriate measures to protect patient data, says security expert Rebecca Herold.

Although EMV is a far more secure payments technology, it can be exploited for fraud if it's improperly implemented, warns Gartner analyst Avivah Litan. What security lessons must be learned from past EMV deployments?

CISOs who want to keep more cyber-attacks from succeeding should focus on decreasing the half-life of vulnerabilities, which refers to the amount of time it takes half of all systems affected by a vulnerability to get patched. That's the advice from Qualys' Wolfgang Kandek.

One of the most difficult challenges in protecting sensitive patient data that's used in medical research is educating researchers and other clinicians who share that data about potential privacy issues, says Dave Summitt of Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida.

By the time venture capitalist Alberto Yépez had breakfast on Monday, global markets had plunged, and the Dow had lost 1,000 points and gained back nearly 900. His message to cybersecurity investors about the volatile market: "I'm still bullish."

Rand Corp.'s Martin Libicki sees circumstances in which a weaker economy could curtail Chinese cyber spying on U.S. companies. Then again, he says, the Chinese government could see spending money on hacking as an economic stimulus.

Hacker attacks often start with spear-phishing attempts, but healthcare entities can take steps to help prevent these scams from being successful, says Connie Barrera, CISO of Jackson Health System in Miami, who describes her organization's approach.

To help mitigate the risk that blackmail and extortion campaigns might target employees, employers' security teams must regularly review post-breach data dumps as well ramp up enforcement of their corporate security policies, says Stephen Coty of Alert Logic.