Get Threat Protection as Savvy as the Attackers Themselves

When it comes to cyber security, the healthcare industry is vulnerable. Providers face substantial regulation around privacy and data security. And hackers have much to gain; recent stats put the black market value of healthcare records at 10 times that of credit card information.

Consider these sobering statistics from the Identity Theft Resource Center: 35.5% of the data breaches reported in 2015 were in the Health/Medical sector. More than 110 million patient records [were] exposed in 2015.

Potential vectors for a healthcare cyber attack include:

• Traditional cyber attacks (desktop and mobile malware, phishing schemes, Trojans, ransomware, etc.)
• Connected medical devices (network-connected monitoring, diagnostic, imaging, and patient care devices, many of which are running COTS operating systems)
• Home healthcare devices (wearable fitness monitors to full-blown telemedicine interfaces)

The Advanced Threat Protection Framework

Mitigating these threats to protected health information and intellectual property requires an interconnected framework of technologies and services designed to protect data and devices wherever they reside and for whatever the nature of the attack. The framework must be flexible, easy to deploy, and highly automated so that it can protect everyone, from remote clinics and users to the largest pharmaceutical companies. The advanced threat protection (ATP) framework includes three major components:

1. Deal with known threats – phishing, exploit techniques, evasion tactics, compromised websites
2. Analyze unknown threats – new vulnerabilities, new malware variants, and new attack techniques
3. Respond to new threats – determine scope and impact, then push intelligence back out to the framework so that previously unknown threats become known and mitigated immediately

To successfully protect patient data and the systems that use it, modern healthcare security must shift away from point solutions towards an ATP framework. Fortinet’s Advanced Threat Protection Framework gives healthcare IT a powerful, unified ecosystem to prevent, detect, and mitigate threats to protected health information and valuable intellectual property.  

This month at HIMSS16 in Las Vegas, Fortinet’s Trish Borrmann caught up with Healthcare Systems Engineer, Kevan Paul, to discuss Fortinet’s end-to-end holistic approach for addressing multiple threat vectors in healthcare.  

Improve Security or Pay the Price

Today, healthcare IT is at a crossroads: either improve security dramatically or suffer costly and damaging, headline-making breaches that impact the bottom line and compromise the identities of those in their care. But there’s a better way.

Implement an ATP solution that’s based on the right ecosystem of hardware, software, and threat intelligence, and you can secure patient data and intellectual property without sacrificing performance. Scalable and manageable solutions exist to meet the wide range of needs across a healthcare organization’s diverse systems – even as involved payment environments, emerging health information systems, and hospital mergers threaten to further complicate matters.

To learn more about healthcare IT security and advanced threat protection, read the full paper now:

http://www.fortinet.com/resource_center/whitepapers/advanced-threat-protection-healthcare-industry.html