The number of major health data breaches posted to the federal tally so far in 2022 - and the total number of individuals affected by those breaches - has surged in recent weeks as reports of large hacking incidents continue to flow in to regulators.
Yet another ransomware-wielding group of criminals has hit an organization in the health sector. This time, it's cybercrime group RansomEXX, which has been trumpeting an attack against the Scottish Association for Mental Health. The crime gang says it has stolen more than 12GB of data from SAMH.
The integration of third-party components and software is an increasingly critical area of security risk that needs more attention from medical device manufacturers, says Anura Fernando, global head of medical device security at safety certification firm UL.
As the Ukrainian military resists Russian advances toward its major population centers, its IT security teams are contending with record cyber incidents - although the same is true of their eastern neighbors, with Russia reporting "unprecedented" cyberattacks on its networks.
If Russia uses hack attacks to support its invasion, would Western governments want to immediately attribute those attacks or disruptions? Enter a Thursday alert from the U.S. government warning that it is "aware of possible threats to U.S. and international satellite communication networks."
Michael Lines is working with ISMG to promote awareness of the need for cyber risk management. As a part of that initiative, CyberEdBoard posts draft chapters from his upcoming book, "Heuristic Risk Management: Be Aware, Get Prepared, Defend Yourself." This chapter is "Recognize the Threats."
The pandemic has raised the ante significantly for the attack surface and the level of insider threats facing healthcare sector entities, according to Dave Bailey, vice president of security services, and attorney Andrew Mahler, vice president of privacy and compliance, of consultancy CynergisTek.
It is critical for medical device manufacturers to take a threat modeling approach early in a product's design stage, say MITRE medical device cybersecurity experts Margie Zuk and Penny Chase, co-authors of the recently released Playbook for Threat Modeling Medical Devices commissioned by the FDA.
Healthcare sector entities increasingly need to implement a zero trust approach with their security, says federal adviser Erik Decker, CISO of Intermountain Healthcare. Zero trust, he says, integrates "a lot of different architecture and systems … that have to work in concert with each other."
Hacking group MuddyWater, linked to the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security, is targeting Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula to conduct espionage and intellectual property theft and to deploy ransomware and destructive malware. The campaign uses malicious documents to deploy RATs on systems.
Despite the drumbeat that began about a decade ago for healthcare entities to bolster their identity and access management, it is still an "incredibly weak" area for many, Lee Kim of HIMSS says. She discusses the effects of cyberattack trends and the Ukraine-Russia War on healthcare organizations.
Cybersecurity in Russia right now is complicated, owing to reprisals over its Ukraine invasion, leading to Russia launching its own root certificate to keep sites online; facing down "Russians only" RURansom wiper malware; and Avast being the latest business to suspend all operations in the country.
With Ukraine having called on the world to join its "IT Army" and help it hack Russia and ally Belarus, what could possibly go wrong? For starters, launching distributed denial-of-service attacks - at least from outside Ukraine - remains illegal and risks triggering an escalation by Moscow.
Federal authorities are warning about seven vulnerabilities affecting a software agent used to remotely manage an array of medical devices and other connected gear. If exploited, the vulnerabilities could enable hackers to gain full control of the affected devices or alter their configurations.
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