News of a ransomware attack hitting a major healthcare technology vendor broke during last year’s ViVE conference. On the attack’s anniversary, and with a federal investigation ongoing, industry leaders reflected on lessons learned during this year’s conference in Nashville, Tenn.
Reflecting on the Change Healthcare attack, which may have exposed the data of more than 190 million people, Lisa Gallagher, national cybersecurity adviser at CHIME, said that though the focus has been on the ransomware aspect of the crime, the threat actors had infiltrated the company’s network days before.
That’s why advanced persistent threats should be a growing concern for healthcare organizations across the country. Previous cybersecurity approaches must evolve as vulnerabilities, threats and attacks increase across the industry.
“We have to make sure that nothing that happens injures a patient,” Gallagher said. “That can happen from a number of different perspectives. It could be specific to a device that’s connected to them. But it could also be like what happened in our ecosystem with Change Healthcare, where we couldn’t process prior authorizations, people couldn’t get into surgeries, ER slowdowns. So, there’s a lot of ways risks to patient safety manifest themselves.”
Cyber resilience is not a buzzword but a strategy that healthcare organizations must consistently strive toward.
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