How to Prevent & Respond to Ransomware Attacks for the healthcare industry?

The frequency of cyberattacks on the healthcare industry will increase every year, but after an increase in the use of telehealth during the Covid-19 the pandemic has made hospitals even more attractive prey for cybercriminals who know companies are not only willing to pay but pay quickly, to get over incidents that disrupt patient care. Because an individual’s medical records can be 20 to 50 times more valuable to hackers than personal financial information.

According to Comparitech study 600 clinics, hospitals, and healthcare organizations were attacked by 92 individual ransomware attacks, affecting 18 million patient records in 2020. The costs of these attacks are almost $21 billion.

As demands become increasingly extortionate, with ransoms amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars, it’s critical to understand how to prevent, detect, and respond to ransomware incidents with the least amount of risk to operability.

Here we’ll discuss the actions that the healthcare industry can take to improve the cybersecurity posture:

Leading cybersecurity efforts by the right people:

Before choosing cybersecurity resource companies make sure that there is an organizational leader who has accountability if there is an attack; the authority to make changes; and enough time to pay attention to the issue.

The leader should prioritize how to mitigate hypothetical cybersecurity incidents before they occur, working out response plans, and thinking through all of the worst-case scenarios so if the day comes, the company is ready.

Prepare a good response plan:

When every employee knows what to do and what the next steps are, then they ready to respond to the cyber-attack. A good plan should be containing ransomware damage, restoring services and data, as well as recovering from the attack.

Train employees to keep away from obvious traps:

Employee cyber-awareness training is an important aspect of all cybersecurity defenses. Even in case of the company is using a cloud-based healthcare software program to manage customer data and the cloud provider’s security team will actively work to shield the patient data from attackers, it is still an obligation to make sure that staff is trained to shield patient data.

Regularly back up data and control who has access to it:

One of the easiest ways to avoid paying a ransom to get data back is to back it up regularly and securely so you can easily restore it. If the hospital has completely ignored to back up its data, making it is extremely difficult to recover the data without paying the ransom.

Apply the right cybersecurity software and services:

With these next-generation hackers, make sure you have up-to-date security software installed on all machines, including anti-malware detection with advanced endpoint protection. If a company uses out-of-date software or hardware that is connected to the internet then hackers can detect very easily and use those vulnerabilities to infiltrate computers.

Having robust and integrated threat intelligence solutions will allow cybersecurity teams to react and reply quicker to alerts and reduce damage from ransomware outbreaks. In addition to effective cloud security and vulnerability management software, here detect and prevent ransomware attacks with the help of 6 tools

• Advanced end-point protection
• Email cloud security
• Web shielding
• Next-gen SIEM
• Network traffic analysis
• Dark Web Monitoring

According to Ponemon, one of the best ways to minimize the impacts of ransomware is to use a managed security service provider (MSSP) to help close the security skills gap. It doesn’t take long to properly secure your healthcare organization, but it does require well-thought-out policies and a plan.