Cybersecurity in healthcare: the case of a European hospital

MSPs and healthcare centers must be aligned and proactively protect themselves from these risks. This strategy enables them to achieve endpoint protection and damage control in the event of a cyberattack. But what steps can be taken to strengthen cybersecurity in the healthcare sector? 

• Healthcare personnel need to adopt good cybersecurity practices. If the medical staff at healthcare centers receive basic training on using secure passwords or identifying potential threats based on fraudulent messages and social engineering such as phishing; or if the administration incorporates multi-factor authentication (MFA), security will improve significantly in the sector. 

• Regular backups of all systems are essential. In an industry with a huge amount of sensitive data such as patient records or the medical staff’s database, recovering lost data is key. Storing a copy of the data in multiple locations, both in the Cloud and offline, avoids paying a ransom to cybercriminals to recover data. 

• Keeping all devices up to date, both hardware and software. The use of outdated PCs, operating systems, and antivirus without the latest updates represent a major cybersecurity breach that hackers could exploit to attack the database. Using advanced devices and managed service providers in the Cloud would make healthcare centers more resilient to these threats. Healthcare centers must deploy an advanced solution incorporating a strong layer of prevention, detection, and response to potential advanced threats (EDR). 

All other initiatives may fall short if they lack full protection at the endpoint. 

Real-life experience 

La Clinique Les Trois Soleils is a prime example of implementing a secure strategy in health centers. When France was in lockdown during the pandemic, the center continued most of its activities on-site and remotely, as the R&D department needed to access the center’s network database off-site, which posed a risk to data protection. Faced with this challenge, the clinic adopted a unified cybersecurity platform incorporating firewalls, Wi-Fi security solutions, and multi-factor authentication (MFA) so employees could work securely.  

This decision enhanced security thanks to the connection between the clinic’s firewall and the provider’s virtual firewall hosted in the data center. The firewall located within the data center is replicated and its inherent security offers an additional guarantee. Thus, data remains physically within the clinic and only remote access is allowed. Moreover, employees working from home could easily identify themselves via MFA, not to mention the improved performance level offered by relying on an external data center to streamline work processes or team meetings.

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