Cybersecurity in Healthcare Featuring Mark Kirby Part 1

So let's talk about how this impacts hospitals, certainly, because we have seen it.

We've had national denial of services for our listeners.

We have bad actors have the ability to essentially cut you off from your access to the Internet.

You have bad actors that have exploited some hole in your cybernet and they've come in and they've shut systems down.

We've seen that.

And oftentimes those bad actors may want to hold the organization hostage.

saying if you pay a ransom here, ransomware, we pay a ransom here, we'll give you your system back.

If you don't pay your ransom, then we're going to do whatever.

And we've seen that in health care, and I'm sure we've seen it in a lot of other fields too.

But in that scenario, let's kind of walk through this a little bit for our listeners.

If an organization, whether it's a physician practice or a hospital, you recognize that something is wrong or your surveillance system has indicated that there's been a breach or nothing works.

And now all of a sudden you're like, okay, what's going on? Nothing works.

And then you get the notice that we've taken over your system and here's what we're demanding of you.

Kind of walk us through maybe what happens in that scenario.

Some folks go through it and some will never go through it, thank goodness.

Kind of walk us through what typically happens.

It may not necessarily have to be healthcare, but any organization that could find themselves in that position.

Well, so a lot of times what we're seeing is, you know, most organizations do a fairly good job protecting their front door.

So the threat actors aren't, it's not as easy as it used to be.

Not to say that a persistent threat won't spend the time and the effort to hopefully catch you in between a patch cycle.

But what they've most likely done is compromise either phishing or something like that.

They've probably been sitting in your network for a while.

They're just waiting.

Yeah, just waiting.

The code has been inserted and they just wait until there's a time that it works best for them and you're asleep potentially.