Do Healthcare Providers Need Help?

Photo: Frank Busch

In an escalating war of cybercrime, smaller healthcare providers are plainly losing more battles than they are winning. Is it time to try a different approach to security?


An increasing number of healthcare providers globally are succumbing to the overwhelming resources of sophisticated nation-state military espionage units and organized crime syndicates. Is it now time for some to consider throwing in the towel and transferring their cyber risks to specialist healthcare managed security services providers?

Covid-19 has transformed healthcare around the world. Many staff have been furloughed as non-emergency procedures are postponed, nearly all non-clinical employees now work from home, and telehealth has largely replaced doctor visits and consults. The attack surface has radically increased and attackers know it!

Many criminals are using this confusion and disruption to attack exposed healthcare systems. They do so for everything from simple criminal monetary gain, via ransomware attacks and other forms of extortion, to the attempted theft of clinical research, other IP, and non-public data, as we reported in our previous article.

Already outnumbered at least five to one, the odds of successfully defending a cyberattack for healthcare providers just got much worse. Would they be better, therefore passing the defensive torch to an outside team of cybersecurity experts?

This was a question I put to my panel of guests this week at the CTG Intelligence Cybersecurity Virtual Forum in Albuquerque, NM. Watch what they had to say below in this 32-minute video.


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