Healthcare Cybersecurity

Places where healthcare is provided must be prepared for the unexpected when it comes to physical security. Patients who are diagnosed with serious illnesses or suffer critical injuries often experience extreme emotional swings while at a facility—as do patients’ friends and family. In addition, criminals enter healthcare facilities to steal controlled substances, cause operational disruptions, and target those who provide controversial types of medical care. In short, physical security is just as critical as cybersecurity in the healthcare industry.

The best way to optimize physical security is to integrate surveillance cameras and recorders with the healthcare cybersecurity solutions, enabling protection for these devices. Integrating telephony into the same network provides seamless connections between security personnel, cybersecurity professionals, and law enforcement.

Fortinet provides the opportunity for institutions to integrate cyber and physical security functions—as well as voice communications and PA systems—onto a single console for both visibility and management. This integrated technology enables phone systems, security cameras, facial recognition, weapons detection technologies, and recordings of footage to be a part of the organization’s overall security architecture. This tech is particularly useful for privacy and security investigations and for keeping all parties informed about incidents in progress. 

Recent research by Verizon identifies the healthcare vertical as having the highest risk from insider threats among all industries. Two factors in this trend: the high value of medical information on the black market and the high turnover in administrative and frontline care positions in the industry. As with other industries, incidents involving insiders can be either accidental or deliberate, and deliberate attacks occur because of a variety of motivations. The stakes are high, as compromised data can result in serious complications or even death, and disclosure of private medical information can incur serious liability on an organization.

Successfully battling insider threats requires a multilayered, coordinated healthcare cybersecurity solutions at a time when trust is no longer a static thing. The network should be intelligently segmented to restrict access to each piece of information to those who need it. Additionally, every request for network resources should be inspected from the perspective of both the user and the device. Such a zero-trust approach helps detect inappropriate activity by insiders and block it before it causes damage.

The Fortinet Security Fabric provides layers of protection against accidental and deliberate insider attacks. Intent-based segmentation helps keep unauthorized users from accessing specific pools of data. Identity and access management tools verify users, while user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) watches for anomalous behavior by trusted users. Presence analytics can also help detect unauthorized access to physical locations, and deception technology lures adversaries into identifying themselves. And network access control (NAC) and advanced endpoint security solutions help with device verification.

Change is the name of the game in healthcare privacy and security—both in technology and in regulation. Compliance continues to become increasingly complex, with different jurisdictions passing different requirements and new technology necessitating new regulations and standards. Emerging trends like embedded medical devices will continue this trend of constant change for the foreseeable future.

To keep up, organizations must build robust but resilient security that can absorb new tools and elements into an integrated architecture—without requiring a full rip-and-replace of the underlying system every few years.

The Fortinet Security Fabric provides a robust, flexible operating system that enables seamless integration of a broad portfolio of Fortinet tools, plus third-party healthcare cybersecurity services via Fabric Connectors, an open ecosystem, and robust application programming interface (API) tools. Fortinet’s deep integration of security solutions deployed on-premises and in the cloud unlocks full automation of security workflows, from detection to response to remediation. Additionally, management, analytics, and event management tools help security teams achieve a proactive rather than a reactive stance toward cybersecurity.

Healthcare organizations’ corporate infrastructures contain a variety of business-critical data, from financials to private medical information to HR records—as well as critical applications needed for lifesaving care. Most institutions now operate in multiple public and private clouds along with the corporate data center, and this can result in even more silos in the security architecture. Increasingly, organizations struggle with imparting consistent security controls for the multitude of enterprise environments that they are responsible for managing. This makes consistent reporting of an enterprise security posture practically impossible.

Organizations facing a fragmented security architecture across their hybrid cloud environment cannot solve their problem without deliberately moving toward end-to-end integration. While the built-in security tools provided by each public cloud provider are useful for what they are designed to do, institutions need a way to aggregate all these systems with the on-premises infrastructure, enabling a single-pane-of-glass view of the entire infrastructure.

Fortinet Adaptive Cloud Security tools, part of the Fortinet Security Fabric, unify healthcare organizations’ hybrid cloud infrastructure by enabling consistent policy management and centralized visibility of the entire infrastructure. These solutions are designed with native integration with all major public cloud providers, broad protection to cover the entire attack surface, and management and automation functionality that enables a proactive approach to threat detection and response, as well as automated compliance reporting.