The healthcare sector remains a target for adversaries who seek to profit from patient data, directly monetize this information or disrupt critical services, coupled with insider threats like operational errors and privilege misuse that heighten vulnerabilities.
Healthcare systems in particular are very exposed, as they have a typical IT estate that is extremely heterogeneous; obsolete monolithic systems coexist with new technologies, creating the maximum attack surface and making it easy to breach for all actors who might be after a harmful action.
Although there are a variety of different threat actors and types, healthcare organizations still maintain the top spot in terms of volume attacked, followed by system intrusions as well as web applications converting into a hotbed for attacks, along with social engineering being one of many other popular attack vectors.
Not only has ransomware been used as a principle method of data exfiltration, but it has likewise imposed severe operational disruptions and resulted in massive financial hits to the affected businesses while significantly deteriorating their standing among partner organizations.
Change The healthcare breach in recent weeks is a perfect example of these new challenges, showing how large amounts of personal data unbeknownst to the medical field could be exfiltrated by threat actors, subsequently leading to high impact and estimated billion costs.
A May 2024 ransomware attack on Ascension knocked out EHR systems across 142 hospitals for more than a month, forcing clinicians to go back to paper records and hurting care delivery.
This has led to confirmed PHI and PII being exfiltrated in the breach, several lawsuits filed, and expected costs exceeding $1.6 billion.
Traditional security controls are being foiled by ransomware attacks carrying fileless and in-memory techniques. Against this, the cure for late ransomware protection requires an accurate understanding of the attack surface, a focus on vulnerabilities to close out, and the power for autonomous adaptive responses.
Bupa is a global healthcare provider and has this same challenge across its Latin American operations, where they discovered that only with proactive, optimized exposure management can they protect their vast client base.
Bupa LATAM also depended on strong security controls, like XDR with Microsoft Defender, to run tests against new threats. A proof of concept using Morphisec AMTD with one major vulnerability revealed that attackers can easily penetrate common anti-detection response solutions on PC servers by transplanting malicious code.
Morphisec offers a novel approach to ransomware prevention by utilizing Automated Moving Target Defense (AMTD). Unlike traditional security solutions that rely on detection and response, it proactively obscures system and application targets, rendering them unrecognizable to attackers.
In its early stages, this new method stops ransomware from running, doing a better job than NGAV, EPP, EDR, XDR, and MDR solutions at stopping advanced, fileless, and in-memory threats.
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