Healthcare Cyber-security: Top Challenges and Ways to Mitigate It

The expansion of digital technology forced several businesses, including healthcare, to adopt IT infrastructure; it helped smoother their workflow. As healthcare centres are increasingly using digital technologies to store patients’ medical data online, they are becoming vulnerable to face serious cyber-security risks.

Securing a system from cyber breach in a healthcare centre requires immense knowledge and a multi-pronged approach. A major cyber-attack is enough to hamper an organisation’s financial status and brand reputation. Therefore, the best way to optimize healthcare security is to take help from IT Outsourcing Companies in Australia. They understand the challenges and put mitigation efforts in place.

Keep reading the post to understand cyber-security challenges in healthcare and ways to eliminate it.

Challenge 1: Ransomware

In the present digital landscape, ransomware is one of the most dangerous and damaging cyber threats. The high dependence on technology makes healthcare services particularly vulnerable to such attacks.

It is usually caused due to phishing emails when the user clicks on a link or downloads an attachment. In general, healthcare records of known patients are a high-reward target for cyber hackers, as it gives them the opportunity to get high ransom amounts from the organisations.

Challenge 2: Insider Threats

This is possibly the deadliest risk that could be posed to IT systems and databases across many healthcare organisations. Insider threats could sabotage any effort to protect sensitive information and make the system vulnerable to intruders.

The term "insider threat" refers to people within an organisation who practices a data breach or hacking of systems through their actions.

Challenge 3: Distribution Denial of Service (DDOS)

Distributed DDoS (DDoS) Attacks are most often seen in IT organisations, but now it is entering into healthcare sectors as well. It is an effective cyber-attack employed by cyber-criminals in order to overload networks to the point of irreparable. Malicious hackers perform DDoS attacks by sending an excessive request to an online service to limit its bandwidth and cause the platform to slow down or even shut down completely.

Healthcare Cyber-security Practices to Mitigate Risks

Although there is no way to prevent every possible attack, following the tips below, you can reduce the impact of cyber threats in healthcare centres.

• Train and educate healthcare staff to better anticipate and prepare for cyber-security threats.
• Take the help of outsourced IT experts and leverage robust cyber security solutions.
• Implement technology such as two-factor authentication and complex password.
• Avoid clicking on the suspicious email.
• Using cloud technology to secure all crucial and sensitive patient information. A cloud service also helps in data backup in case of a data breach.

Solutions IT — Your One Stop Destination for all IT needs

We have a high reputation for delivering tailor-made IT solutions. Over the past few years, we have catered to various industries, including the health care sector, online education, NFP organisations, and SMBs. Our skilled and dedicated technical team focuses on providing IT services and support that enable our clients to realize their short and long business goals.

Source: https://medium.com/@solutionsit62/healthcare-cyber-security-top-challenges-and-ways-to-mitigate-it-63b0968164a

Solutions IT is well known for providing IT solutions to various western Australian small and medium-sized businesses and having expertise in delivering quality services for in-house resources, system audit, cloud technologies and many more.