By Samantha Acuna
Cybersecurity measures have become a major talking point in society, no matter what business your company is involved in. If you deal with sensitive information, you have to ensure that these proper measures are in place, so people do not breach your database and steal all of it. This is especially important in the healthcare field as people’s medical records will contain plenty of sensitive information that should not be leaked out. Here are some ways to innovate your clinical cybersecurity and keep the information of your patients safe.
Use White-Hat Hacking to Your Advantage
When talking about online hacking there are several different ways of describing the process. Black-hat or grey-hat hacking is the process of someone breaking into someone’s system without their permission and then requesting a fee for doing so. If the fee is not paid, they will often leak the contents of the database online for everyone to see. Such as in the case of the Tandem Diabetes Care Data Breach where a hacker gained access to an employee email account. The company did not have proper security measures in place and did not have anyone test these measures. People were able to steal personal information and now there is a class-action lawsuit in place against them for this.
White-hat hacking on the other hand is considered to be an ethical type of hacking. Generally a paid position, a white-hat hacker is someone who works to find insecurities in the system and then alert the company and find possible ways to fix the breach. It is a great way to go about spotting any gaps in the system without a risk of information being leaked. If you want to test your security system for potential holes, look into hiring a white-hat hacker.
Plenty of Firewalls
The next thing to look into and consider in regards to healthcare cybersecurity is installing firewalls. Firewalls are a device that monitors incoming and outgoing traffic and can detect unauthorized devices attempting to bypass it. If it detects an unauthorized device, it will deny it entry into the system. For the most part, firewalls are good at their job, but there are many ways to get around this. This is why it is important to have a multi-level security system full of firewalls in the case that one of them gets compromised. Therefore, there are still several levels of security available, even after the first fails. Always look to use plenty of firewalls in your healthcare cybersecurity system. This can keep your information safe from even the best of hackers.
Cybersecurity is something that cannot be taken lightly as it not only can release sensitive information to the public, but it also can end up costing your company millions of dollars as seen in class action lawsuits. Therefore, ensure that you and your company are taking the correct cybersecurity steps to keep your company safe. While it might be costly to do so, it is something that is absolutely mandatory for any company in the healthcare field.
Samantha Acuna is a writer based in San Francisco, CA. Her work has been featured in The Huffington Post, Entrepreneur.com, and Yahoo Small Business.
