Akamai emerged just as the Web was getting big, and has been making web traffic fast and secure through most of the Web’s history. According to Tony Lauro, their Director of Security Technology & Strategy, one-third of the world’s web traffic passes through their servers. And Lauro has special insights for keeping health care sites secure.
One source of vulnerabilities is the rapid adoption of new technologies and APIs for patient engagement, billing, and other activities. Other industries made the transition earlier and have built up “scar tissue” to deal with attacks: “Now health care has to go through that pain.”
But the huge volume of legacy equipment and services can be a problem too. Vulnerabilities might be discovered in decade-old systems.
The health care field, according to Lauro, does not invest as much in covering all the security bases as other industries do with similar revenues. Thus, health care is an attractive target for ransomware, whose perpetrators look for victims with a large ability to pay.
Lauro says that as organizations move their operations into the cloud, they must learn to deal with servers over which they don’t have direct control. Furthermore, organizations overwhelmingly want the reliability of multiple cloud services, each with different administrative tools.
The cloud is not more secure by default; each company still has to manage its security. And the staff need to understand multiple environments. Ideally, you’ll find tools that integrate the different environments and present a single interface.
Lauro also discusses AI in this video: both its use by attackers to find the best targets, and its use by organizations to look for deviations and to apply best practices.
The U.S. General Services Administration has recently released guidelines for organizations to use AI effectively in security, share best practices, and attest to the use of best practices.
Lauro also discusses the effects of social engineering attacks, which can bypass standard security architectural practices such as VLANs. AI can help to find suspicious behavior quickly, so that the organization can isolate an attack and reduce its “blast radius.”
He says, “You need to keep up with the times.” Watch the video for more insights about modern security in health care IT.
Learn more about Akamai: https://www.akamai.com/
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