According to a report from Clearswift, 67% of UK healthcare organisations experienced some kind of cybersecurity incident in 2019. Attacks continued to plague the sector throughout the pandemic.
Storing vast amounts of patient, financial and medical research data, organisations like the NHS hold powerful and lucrative information, making them a key target for malicious attacks.
A cyberattack on healthcare is very different from an attack on any old computer. It’s an attack on patients, their care provision, and the equipment or resources needed to keep them safe.
The 2017 WannaCry ransomware hack starkly highlighted the vulnerability of the NHS. Eighty of the 236 NHS trusts were either infected or shut down their systems as a precaution, staff were unable to access patient information, and thousands of appointments and surgeries were cancelled. The NHS was inadequately prepared to respond to the crisis, posing urgent questions about the effectiveness of its cybersecurity measures.
‘Built with hospitals, for hospitals’, Cylera is purpose-built to solve the uniquely complex technological and operational cybersecurity challenges that hospitals face. Recently, it unveiled a new dashboard and features within the Cylera MedCommand™ Platform, developed specifically to help its NHS Trust customers more rapidly meet response requirements to NHS Digital high severity cyber alerts.
NHS Trusts are required to respond quickly to cyber threat notifications received from NHS Digital’s Data Security Centre (DSC) and must acknowledge receipt of high-security cyber alerts within 48 hours. This helps to protect against the rise in high-security exploits that could impact patient care, privacy, and service continuity.
Whether it’s stealing and deleting patient data or hacking medical devices such as MRI scanners, cyber-attacks need to be viewed as a threat to patient safety – not just an IT issue.
According to Paul Bakoyiannis, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and co-founder at Cylera: “Cylera wanted to make it extremely easy for Trusts to quickly respond to NHS Digital cyber alerts, and provide very time-efficient workflows.
“The new Cyber Alert Dashboard provides access to all current and historical cyber alerts, and through our analysis, users can immediately tell what systems are affected in the Cylera register of medical and IoT devices. The whole response workflow can be managed from one dashboard; receipt, assignment, resolution, and timely reporting back to NHS Digital for compliance purposes.”
The new dashboard features a single view that brings all the current and historical NHS Digital cyber alerts into view in one place. From here, customers can manage the entire process of receiving and responding to cyber alerts, including the ability to sort by severity, date published, affected devices, alert type, status, etc.
The dashboard can also be a validation source for auditors who may be assisting NHS Trusts to help meet their 2022 DSPT Data Security and Protection Toolkit requirements.
Source: Cylera
Core to Cloud is Cylera’s partner. If you want to find out more about how Cylera could protect your organisation, get in touch with our expert team today.
