Key Attributes Every Hospital Should Consider for Network Cybersecurity - Vinay Sharma, Regional Director, India and SAARC, NETSCOUT.

A recent research report revealed that Indian healthcare was the sector most impacted by cyberattacks compared to others.  Also, healthcare networks worldwide remain top targets for cybercriminals.  Unfortunately, these hospital networks have generated large attack surfaces due to complex and unintegrated systems giving rise to vulnerabilities.  The lack of comprehensive visibility across the attack surface has also contributed to the increase.  Cyber attackers can easily exploit these vulnerabilities and also pose challenges during typical outages and cause latency issues. 

In the hospitals where precious lives are saved, the need for 24/7 uptime is critical.   It is critical for healthcare executives to work closely with IT operations teams to ensure technology investments deliver secure and reliable services.  This being in place, indicates and supports superior patient care, safeguards revenues, and mitigates reputational risks.

Here are key areas that all Security, Application, and Network team leaders must focus on to protect their organizations from disruptions that could compromise patient care.

•        Proactive measures to prevent ransomware

Trusting only malware-focused security solutions is not adequate to fight ransomware effectively. Preventing ransomware attacks successfully requires the ability to detect unusual user behavior and suspicious network activity long before malware encrypts files and a ransom is demanded. With organizational networks as the backbone of all digital traffic and a conduit for cyber threats, healthcare system executives should prioritize solutions that provide comprehensive visibility across their entire network rather than investing in narrow, single-threat security tools. To stay ahead of ransomware, DDoS attacks, and other cyber threats, organizations must adopt network security solutions that go beyond logs and metrics, leveraging deep packet data analysis to identify anomalies and predict future attack activity.

•        Quick identification of the root cause of cyber incidents

Comprehensive network data allows rapid root-cause identification, eliminating prolonged war room sessions and streamlining incident resolution. Effective cybersecurity requires deep, broad visibility, along with high-quality, actionable data that enhances the performance of SIEM, SOAR, and AIOps solutions. The best security data should be extendable and accessible across network, security, and application teams. Real network security is embedded in packet-level visibility, going beyond analyzing metrics, logs, and traces. In the absence of packet-level analysis, incident response teams lack the real-time and historical insights needed to swiftly investigate, analyze, and mitigate security threats before they escalate.

•        Enhancing collaboration and efficiency

Traditionally, network, security, and application teams have operated in silos with separate budgets, vendors, and perspectives, leading to a fragmented view of network security that leaves healthcare systems vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Without clear, unified visibility into all network activity, patient care could be delayed for hours or days following a security incident. Leaders should assess their teams' progress in addressing outages, latency, and DDoS attacks over the past year. It is important to also evaluate the quality of data used to identify security gaps and whether it includes network packets. Packet-based "conversational" network data is essential for quickly identifying root causes and ensuring systems remain focused on delivering high-quality patient care.

•        Addressing Third-party security risk

A major challenge for healthcare systems is the Third-party security risk, with a significant number of data breaches stemming from third-party partners. However, all cyber incidents begin on the network, and taking a network-centric perspective on security involves having the network, security, and applications teams monitor third-party applications as well as their own.  These teams must prioritize securing critical applications, monitoring unusual activity, and enforcing stringent third-party security measures.  This includes compliance with data protection standards, encryption, dual-factor authentication, HIPAA regulations, and industry frameworks like ISO.

•        Duplicate data and costs

While AIOps platforms help automate IT operations and ease the monitoring burden, IDC estimates that 30% of metric, log, and trace data processed by these systems is duplicative, driving up costs and contributing to false positives. To optimize efficiency and reduce expenses, IT operations teams should explore solutions that enable smarter data correlation across sources and minimize duplication.  This would reduce false positives that waste resources while focussing on real security and performance issues and generate savings on operating expenses.

With the life-savings nature of the healthcare industry, modern networks and applications depend on the flawless performance and uninterrupted availability of the infrastructure that supports them. IT departments have the responsibility of keeping healthcare technology systems operating at peak performance to ensure providers have access to the tools and patients can receive the best quality care.