cybersecurity

Telehealth was an unexpected technology bright spot in 2020, as the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) relaxed enforcement of certain aspects of HIPAA, helping to reduce COVID exposure via virtual rounding and virtual visits.

Unfortunately, bad actors have shown a lack of morality in their pursuit of illegal profits and have continued to attack medical organizations. Ransomware attacks, for example, can cripple a hospital’s abilities to provide high-quality patient care by denying access to key computer systems, which would force medical professionals to have to treat patients based on memory and paper-based records.

The following three high-level recommendations provide a basis for defense in depth for healthcare organizations in 2021.

Kayne McGladrey (@kaynemcgladrey), Security Architect at Ascent Solutions, agrees: “Microsoft 365, for example, allows for automatic classification and labeling of unstructured data, but also permits users to provide a justification when the automation gets it wrong.

“Combined with automated data loss prevention, this can allow a business to easily enforce and report on policies for sharing non-public data both inside and outside of their organization,” he says.

Companies should record video calls when doing so poses an obvious business benefit, the participants have consented to it, and there are adequate controls in place to limit access to the resulting video to only authorized parties, Kayne McGladrey, security architect at cybersecurity consultancy Ascent Solutions, said.

To ensure accessibility,companies should also strongly consider using closed captioning on call recordings, McGladrey added.

Cybersecurity has always been a critical task that must be handled effectively. However, cloud—and more recently—COVID 19—have exacerbated cybersecurity issues and changed the security landscape. In this episode of the podcast, Mike Kavis and guest, Ascent Solutions’ Kayne McGladrey, discuss cybersecurity in the context of cloud, and vis-à-vis the changes wrought by the pandemic. Kayne’s take is that the transition to cloud and the pandemic have exposed and magnified issues that have always been a problem, and that companies should not skimp on cybersecurity, in favor of spending on other “more pressing” projects. The key to success is to focus on data, automation, and risk assessment.

“Being able to rapidly detect and evict threats is necessary in the modern enterprise to avoid regulatory and legal penalties while protecting confidential data or trade secrets,” says Kayne McGladrey, CISSP (@kaynemcgladrey), cybersecurity strategist at Ascent Solutions.

What a delightful surprise! I was nominated and won one of the three “Top Cyber Pro” awards for 2020.

I hope you’ve already had a risk definition conversation- get in front of the board or in front of your CIO or in front of your CFO, whoever is going to ultimately pay the bill. And then for anything where you know you can’t afford it because you’ve seen a reduction in your budget as a consequence of the pandemic- have that conversation early with your cyber insurance broker.

Linux continues to be a popular deployment choice for new virtual machines on Azure. “Organizations moving legacy on-premises Linux servers to the cloud can quickly gain the benefits of robust disaster recovery and security without needing to change platforms or applications”

The pandemic’s continuing effects on corporate budgets will result in a net reduction in cybersecurity budgets in 2021.

Unfortunately the sessions were not recorded due to privacy concerns.

“Have a KPI about value that came out of your threat intelligence feed. Did it actually cause you to do something differently? Were your analysts able to act on this, or was it just another thing that they had to go look at? Because when you think of time as being our chief enemy, if it’s sucking time and not producing value, why do you keep it? It’s a data feed, ultimately. At the end of the day, you have to contextualize it in terms of your organization. Threat actors tend to vary in terms of behavior in their TTPs. And consequently, you need to really tailor your threat intelligence. And if you’re not getting that tailored information, drop it.”

IT and security response to the coronavirus pandemic was heroic. Although many organizations had some degree of remote-work capabilities pre-COVID-19, the past year brought this work to new levels.

Enterprise security has had to quickly evolve alongside the shift to remote work and cloud adoption. For example, companies successfully ramped up VPN infrastructure, shifted to online models of collaboration software, and re-examined security policies in light of a highly distributed workforce.