With healthcare systems under attack, some edge vendors offer free assistance
The coronavirus crisis seems far from reaching the end, yet hackers have made it their mission to ensure the healthcare sector has some extra challenges apart from the increasing number of daily patients. When under attack, healthcare practitioners are being blocked from access to critical information such as medical history or medication requirements. Some vendors are stepping up to help out.
Dozens of hospitals and labs have already been infected with ransomware, Fortune writes, the latest victim being a company in the U.K that was just about to perform clinical trials for a vaccine.
Bill Siegel, chief executive officer of Coveware, told Fortune that six healthcare providers have already been infected with ransomware. Coveware is a provider of ransomware recovery services that is offering free assistance to healthcare companies.
The rising number of attacks in Europe has been confirmed by Europol, while security experts believe a crime group that leverages a strain of ransomware called Maze is behind the attacks.
In March, the FBI’s cyber division warned about a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) used in global Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) targeting a number of industries, including the healthcare sector. Detected in 2016, Kwampirs malware is actively attacking entities in the healthcare sector include transnational healthcare companies and local hospital organizations, where the malware-infected software supply chain and hardware products including industrial control systems (ICS). Other industries affected include companies in the software supply chain, energy, and engineering sectors across the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
Edge Security – Vendors offer assistance
Cybersecurity platform for IoT medical devices Medigate is making its product available for free during the coronavirus crisis to help improve real-time visibility of connected medical devices and data operations, the company announced.
The platform finds, categorizes and secures all devices connected to the network, including those running proprietary communication protocols which are decoded with deep packet inspection (DPI) to provide location, status and security posture.
Medigate can successfully differentiate between real threats and false positives and it evaluates communication and workflow patterns to detect cybersecurity threats and suspicious activity at device and network level.
CDN and edge platform provider Fastly is committing $50m in 2020 to services that support non-profit organizations such as Doctors Without Borders. The program has been in place since 2014, and its budget is now being doubled to assist organizations impacted by COVID-19.
Securing worker access from the edge
Although not strictly healthcare-related, several companies are stepping up and offering secure access services to companies. This is important because nearly the entire workforce has had to change policies and adapt to current conditions of remote work and shifting business hours, yet this has created many vulnerabilities, warns Security Info Watch.
The Data Privacy Monitor has warned that remote work could increase exposure to ransomware attacks, yet Security Info Watch points out that a drop in revenue due to the current crisis could reduce cybersecurity budgets.
Some companies that have already been offering secure access services for remote workers that are built around edge platforms. Two vendors offering free access for companies needing to secure remote workers include Cloudflare (with its Cloudflare for Teams service available free through September 1) and Akamai (with its Enterprise Application Access service available for free for the first two months).
Article Topics
device edge | FBI | IoT | ransomware | security
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