The healthcare industry represents a treasure trove for cyber hackers with valuable patient information on tap Stored data within many institutions includes individual’s blood type, medications, treatments, lab test results as well as financial data including bank details, credit card and insurance information. This data on the black market; according to data analyst, Aberdeen Group, can fetch around ?400 per record. This represents 500 times more than a credit card number itself. With valuable information like this at the fingertips of cyber criminals, both patients and healthcare organisations stand to pay a high price.
According to research we sponsored earlier this year with the Ponemon Institute, within healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, an average of 30 percent of outbound Web traffic is encrypted today and these organisations expect that percentage to increase to 48 percent over the next 12 months. Indeed, healthcare organisations have been taking a multipronged approach, using a combination of people, policies and technical controls to combat cyberattack and protect information, with encryption being considered as a best practice for protecting the electronic medical records (EMR) and personal health information (PHI) of patients.
Encryption ensures sensitive data remains private when it’s transmitted, preventing unauthorised users from viewing it, even when intercepted. Secure socket layer/Transport layer security (SSL/TLS) is now the most common encryption standard used to protect information as it traverses the internet. Most importantly SSL/TLS establishes an encrypted link between web servers and browsers to keep the information passed between the two private.
But here is where the problems lie, many established security solutions were implemented prior to the widespread use of SSL/TLS and therefore are unable to inspect encrypted traffic. Whilst great at protecting privacy data, SSL/TLS encryption can also be used to hide malicious activity from detection.
The bottom line is that most healthcare organisations simply do not have the capabilities they need to mitigate the risks potentially hiding in encrypted traffic. Going back to our research, according to the Ponemon study, 41 percent of healthcare and pharmaceutical respondents felt their current security investment was ineffective because of outbound/inbound encrypted traffic; 68 percent agreed the inability of their organisation’s current security infrastructure to inspect encrypted traffic compromises their ability to meet existing and future compliance requirements. 92 percent of healthcare and pharmaceutical organisations recognise that inspection of SSL traffic is “Important” to “Essential” to their organisation’s overall security infrastructure, only 39 percent decrypt Web traffic to detect attacks, intrusions and malware.
The top four barriers most healthcare companies have when it comes to inspecting encrypted traffic are;
· 51% performance degradation
· 37% lack enabling security tools
· 43% have insufficient resources
· 37% have a lack of knowledge or expert personnel
The challenge for healthcare companies is understanding the features in terms of importance for an SSL inspection tool. When asked what their key priorities are; 87 percent felt SSL certificates and keys would mean secure management, 85 percent wanted the tool to meet current and future performance demands and 81 percent wanted the tool to maximise the uptime and performance requirements of the security infrastructure. Whilst 78 percent regarded satisfaction of compliance requirements as a very important.
As we move towards digitising more and more of our health service and in particular patient information so the threats continue to increase and healthcare organisations must get smarter about protecting their data and employing SSL inspection solutions in order to protect encrypted traffic.
