How Healthcare Organizations Can Combat Ransomware

Adopt a layered approach to cybersecurity: This strategic shift is vital in the defense against the growing number of sophisticated attacks, including ransomware. Doing this requires integrating various tools, including antivirus, firewalls and web filters, and screening for malicious activity to minimize the risk. Adopting a layered cybersecurity strategy reduces the vulnerabilities within the healthcare network.

Rethink business continuity: For healthcare enterprises where data has life or death implications, it's critical that the business continuity plan reflects that fact. Backing up sensitive patient data weekly or even daily is not sufficient in healthcare, and organizations should look for a continuous backup solution that allows them to treat sensitive information appropriately. It's important to note that when it comes to business continuity, one size doesn't fit all. Also, attackers have gotten very sophisticated about targeting backups during ransomware attacks, so ensuring offline or otherwise protected backups of critical data are available is extremely important.

Phishing training: With attacks often being initiated via email, healthcare organizations must undertake regular training to help raise awareness of the pitfalls. With people working 24/7 in distributed environments, training healthcare workers needs to be more flexible to ensure that no one is forgotten. It's important to educate employees on spotting suspicious links and being mindful of grammar, punctuation, spelling, and formatting errors, as these are often phishing red flags. Arming everyone with this knowledge and updating them regularly on the latest cyber scams reduces the likelihood of employees clicking on dubious links and can help ward off attacks.

Strengthen employee passwords: Trojan malware often attempts to propagate through an environment using lists of common or compromised passwords. Emotet, one of the suspected Trojans involved in the UHS attack, does this. Hospitals must end the practice of sharing credentials and integrate a tool to continuously search for exposed, common credentials. If employee or admin credentials are compromised or using common passwords or derivatives of common passwords, it's easier for nefarious actors to initially access and propagate through corporate infrastructure.

Make multifactor authentication mandatory: Sensitive systems and data should require more than one login layer for security. Organizations must add additional authentication mechanisms to deter hackers rather than hoping than one will suffice.

Only permit remote access via a virtual private network: Healthcare organizations have many workers that aren’t on the front lines and are working remotely for the foreseeable future. Hospitals must mandate that employees use a VPN to access work-related systems or data from home to keep this information protected.