Info Risk Today Podcast

Artificial intelligence technologies offer tremendous promise in healthcare, but it's crucial for organizations to carefully assess the complex data privacy concerns involved with different types of AI products and deployments, said Karen Habercoss, chief privacy officer at UChicago Medicine.

The chaos experienced by thousands of healthcare organizations in the wake of the massive Change Healthcare cyberattack and IT outage in February is proof that most organizations are simply unprepared for such devastating incidents, said Bryan Chnowski, deputy CISO at Nuvance Health.

Many healthcare organizations have discovered major gaps in business operations preparedness - the ability to quickly rebound from major IT disruptions, such as those caused by the Change Healthcare cyberattack. Jigar Kadakia, CISO of Emory Healthcare, said it's time to come up with a Plan B.

Healthcare is increasingly complex and interconnected, and the push to exchange more digital patient information among providers adds to the threat of busy staff falling victim to phishing and other scams that can jeopardize data, said Krista Arndt, CISO of United Musculoskeletal Partners.

It's critical for CISOs to study what went wrong in major ransomware IT disruptions and breaches hitting the healthcare sector and to look closely within their own organizations for similar gaps or vulnerabilities, said Michael Prakhye, CISO of Adventist HealthCare.

A study investigating the impact of ransomware attacks on hospitals and the ripple effect on nearby facilities is a call to action for policymakers to seriously address how those assaults can be better handled in the health sector, said researchers Rahi Abouk and David Powell.

By decentralizing the ownership of cybersecurity and increasing security consciousness among everyone in the organization, businesses can improve their security posture, said Dom Lombardi, the vice president of security and trust at Kandji. He discussed the concept of collaborative security.

A recent White House memo on bolstering the security and resiliency of critical infrastructure sectors calls for comprehensive mapping and risk assessment of all critical components and interdependencies within the healthcare ecosystem, said Greg Garcia of the Healthcare Sector Coordinating Council.

Updating software as new vulnerabilities are discovered persistently remains a top medical device cybersecurity challenge, said David Brumley, a cybersecurity professor at Carnegie Mellon University and CEO of security firm ForAllSecure. Solving this requires a major mindset shift, he said.

Oomnitza co-founder and CEO Arthur Lozinski discusses enterprise technology management - a solution that brings software, hardware and infrastructure asset management together in a single database and uses automation to set and enforce policies for the enterprise as a whole.

Information Security Media group CTO and CISO Dan Grosu discusses the challenges of realistically implementing the directives in President Joe Biden's executive order on artificial intelligence. Hint: He thinks it's going to be "a madhouse" if enterprises don't get more educated about AI.

While fewer healthcare websites appear to be using online trackers now than a year ago, nearly 1 in 3 firms are still using Meta Pixel and similar tech tools despite warnings from regulators and a rise in class action litigation alleging privacy violations, said Ian Cohen, CEO of Lokker.

SecurityGate CEO Ted Gutierrez said the SEC's new cybersecurity mandates give "more teeth to the idea that cybersecurity is a business problem." He discussed the need for CISOs to link cyber risk and business outcomes and other ways in which the rules affect the field of cybersecurity.

While most healthcare sector organizations hit with ransomware attacks never imagine giving in to extortion demands, the pressures they face in dealing with the crisis often push about half of them to pay, said attorney Lynn Sessions of BakerHostetler, speaking about the firm's healthcare clients.

Medical device makers submitting products for premarket approval by the Food and Drug Administration often struggle the most with cybersecurity in three major areas - design controls, providing a software bill of materials and testing, according to Nastassia Tamari of the FDA.

In this episode of the "Cybersecurity Insights" podcast, Uptycs CEO Ganesh Pai discusses unifying XDR and CNAPP to improve visibility and explains the coming shift from behavioral detection to outlier or anomaly detection, which uses sophisticated ML and AI.

Healthcare sector organizations often still struggle to implement security frameworks effectively, often not fully understanding the requirements or failing to integrate them into their overall cybersecurity strategy, said Keith Forrester of security firm Optiv, who offers tips to help.

Robotic medical devices, such as surgical gear, offer great potential to improve patient care, but the cyber risks associated with these products must be carefully addressed, said Kevin Fu, director of the Archimedes Center for Health Care and Medical Device Cybersecurity at Northeastern University.

Besides not doing cyberthreat modeling at all, some the biggest mistakes medical device manufacturers can make are starting the modeling process too late in the development phase or using it simply as a "paper weight exercise," said threat modeling expert Adam Shostack of Shostack & Associates.

Healthcare entities can easily achieve many of the cyber performance goals set by regulators if they deploy technology solutions that provide robust security by default and create an organizational culture in which security-mindedness is ingrained, said Taylor Lehmann of Google Cloud.