While the use of telehealth has surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, the data security and privacy concerns for both patients and healthcare providers have also increased, says cybersecurity strategist Kayne McGladrey.
Patients must be proactive in ensuring that their computers or other devices used to conduct telehealth appointments with their doctors are “free of malware that is recording your sessions – your conversations and webcam stream – that [cybercriminals] will use in trying to extort money from you at a later date,” McGladrey says in an interview with Information Security Media Group.
On the provider side, “a lot of the onus lies in ensuring that data is being transferred in a secure fashion … so that it can’t be intercepted in transmission, but also on the back end,” he says. “How are those [patient encounter] videos and chats being stored?
Business continuity and disaster recovery procedures for telehealth are also top considerations as the rate of ransomware attacks accelerates, he says.
In this interview (see audio link below photo), McGladrey also discusses:
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Emerging mental health telehealth security concerns;
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The importance of multifactor authentication in telehealth;
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Other telehealth cybersecurity considerations.
McGladrey is a cybersecurity strategist at security consultancy Ascent Solutions. He’s a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the professional association also known as IEEE, and has more than 20 years of experience working with Fortune 500 companies to build cybersecurity best practices.