August 26, 2020 – The Office of Civil Rights recently shared ways an IT asset inventory can create a more effective risk analysis to close information security gaps and support HIPAA compliance. Given the sophistication of the current threat landscape, these functions will prove crucial in supporting an overall resilient healthcare information security program. 

While cybersecurity awareness has drastically improved across the healthcare sector, Impact Advisor’s Shefali Mookencherry, Principal Advisor and Solution Leader of Information Security, Privacy, and Disaster Recovery, explained that has not translated into a more secure infrastructure. 

Currently, there are far too many cybersecurity considerations when it comes to making a more secure healthcare system, as internal users continue to be one of the biggest risks to the healthcare system and hackers are increasingly improving the sophistication of their phishing campaigns, she added. And those threats have rapidly increased amid the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In the last week alone, reports from security 

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The health care industry has long been a primary target of malicious cybercriminals, but since the emergence of COVID-19, organizations on the front lines of fighting the pandemic have experienced a rise in cybersecurity incidents and attacks. Between February and June of 2020, HIPAA-covered entities reported 192 large scale data breaches to the US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Civil Rights (OCR) – more than twice as many as were reported during the same period in 2019.¹

While the types of cyber threats health care organizations have encountered during the COVID-19 pandemic are not wholly original, factors including the rapid shift to remote work, the expansion of telehealth and the strain on resources experienced by many organizations, have combined to create new security vulnerabilities and challenges. For example, in recent months, some health care organizations may have temporarily relaxed firewall rules to facilitate additional work-from-home capabilities, short-circuited vendor diligence or contracting protocols in order to rapidly deploy or expand telehealth capabilities, or quickly erected temporary medical facilities in parking lots…

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