Cyberattacks in healthcare are on the rise, and the industry must not only develop strategies to fight off these incidents but also keep systems up and running at the same time. That involves a process called cyber resilience.
Healthcare organizations must plan for network outages, possible electronic health record downtime and outages of vital medical systems if a surprise ransomware attack, such as a vishing or a man-in-the-middle attack, occurs.
Errol Weiss, chief security officer at the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center (Health-ISAC), says that organizations have shifted from simply preventing attacks to detecting and responding to them as part of a cyber resilience effort.
“It’s the monitoring, speed to action and response to mitigation,” Weiss says. “That is what matters today.”
Cyber resilience is how organizations maintain continuity during and after an attack. While cybersecurity allows organizations to defend against an incident, cyber resilience involves identifying and recovering from an attack.
Tim Morris, chief security adviser for the Americas at Tanium, compares cyber resilience plans to changing a passenger’s seat in flight or while refueling. That means patching applications while other applications are running simultaneously.
“You have to be able to run everything, patch it and not suffer the downtime from a consumer point of view,” Morris says.
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