Vendor Notebook: Clearwater and BreachLock Launch New Cyber Threat Detection Services
It’s no secret that healthcare organizations are severely affected by cyber attacks on their vast IT footprints. Regulators need increasingly higher levels of cyber hygiene and defense maturity to better protect patients and patient data and prevent disruption of critical healthcare services by ransomware.
In December, the U.S. Health and Human Services also suggested civil monetary penalties for healthcare organizations found to have violated HIPAA as a result of an attack, adding a new layer of digital complexity to healthcare services. While the American Hospital Association and others have pushed back against HHS over its proposal to penalize hospitals after attack-related data breaches, software vendors and technology consultants are busier than ever exploring how they can step in and provide products and services that protect against attacks. and enforcing compliance with mandatory and proposed cybersecurity requirements.
Many companies offer managed detection and response to improve cyber posture and protect healthcare organizations, and experts say surveillance strategies, such as pen testing, are key to HIPAA compliance. This week, Clearwater announced a new partnership that has already paid off at one regional hospital and BreachLock, which offers an automated Penetration Testing as a Service platform, said its cyber defense capabilities will soon interface with cloud platforms.
Akamai, which offers cloud computing and security services, has released a product that stops collection attacks without blocking “good” traffic to websites — including patient portals that are entry points to large amounts of protected health data.
Clearwater and 1stResponder are working together on MDR
Clearwater has announced its new 24/7 threat hunting and monitoring partnership with 1stResponder, a digital forensics and incident response consultant for healthcare, government and financial services.
The new program expands Clearwater’s incident response capabilities, leveraging 1stResponder’s ability to quickly deploy MDR services to healthcare organizations’ endpoints, network and hybrid cloud environments, the company said in its announcement Tuesday.
For smaller healthcare organizations that are considered among the most vulnerable to cyber attacks, the program can improve cyber resilience by filling security and compliance gaps that many healthcare systems and providers have, such as security leadership, risk assessment and technical testing opportunities — such as tabletop exercises that build “muscle memory” — and more, Clearwater said.
The company also noted that one regional hospital recovered from a cyberattack, resumed operations and was able to prevent future attacks through digital forensics, ongoing 24/7 security monitoring and other services offered through the partnership.
“Effective risk management, monitoring, detection and response, as well as incident response capabilities tailored to healthcare needs, are key components of a strong and resilient cybersecurity program for healthcare providers and digital healthcare companies,” said Steve Cagle, CEO of Clearwater. a statement.
BreachLock brings automated pen testing to cloud platforms
As part of a larger expansion of its automated PTaaS platform and attack management suite, BreachLock said Monday it will introduce SaaS Security Audit and Cloud Security Audit services for cloud-based services, applications and data.
In addition to launching new pentesting services for validating security controls, the company announced that it will also bring human-delivered, AI-powered and automated attack surface management and Red Teaming as a Service to cyber-vulnerable organizations.
“After running hundreds of thousands of penetration tests, ASM scans and automated tests for customers across industries, our AI-driven data contains comprehensive information on vulnerabilities, exploits, threats and remediation best practices to draw conclusions or make intelligent decisions in real-time regarding security test results,” said Seemant Sehgal, CEO and founder of BreachLock, in a statement.
Akamai releases content protector to stop scraping attacks
For years, cybercriminals have conducted widespread patient portal attacks using bots that test stolen credentials and then harvest the information of the accounts they can compromise.
Data scraping can expose PHI. According to researchers at Imperva, a total of 96% of login pages were affected by bad bots in 2016.
Rupesh Chokshi, senior vice president and general manager of application security at Akamai, said in a statement Tuesday that the new tool protects an organization’s digital assets from threats.
It provides protocol fingerprinting and assessment at the application level, assesses user behavior and interactions and provides risk ratings of site traffic based on the anomalies found, Akamai said.
“Content Protector is more than just a security tool; it’s a business enabler,” said Chokshi.
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.