Are Your Remote Working Tools Leaving You Vulnerable to Hackers?

What you can do to mitigate them

With the Russian SVR constantly scanning, targeting, and exploiting US critical infrastructure and allied networks, it’s important for all organizations to know what they should do to avoid and mitigate the loss of sensitive information. 

This is especially important for healthcare practices like yours because healthcare systems are critical infrastructures, too. You have a critical infrastructure within your organization, and you need to protect it.

The NSA, CISA, and FBI have provided specific mitigations against each of the identified vulnerabilities, and these can be carried out by highly skilled network defenders and cybersecurity officers.

However, there are also general measures that your practice can implement with the help of a cybersecurity IT expert:

Keep your systems and products up to date.

Unfortunately, it’s not enough to simply update—you need to update as soon as patches are released. Malicious actors tend to look at outdated software for cracks in your network security. Without the latest security patches, they can sneak in between these gaps and infiltrate your network.

Secure privileges and accounts.

If you’ve experienced data theft or data modification, don’t expect an update, a patch, or other reactive actions to fix things. Take a more proactive stance by anticipating breaches and preparing for them. Enforce least-privileged access, regularly change passwords, and implement regular account reviews.

Set up an out-of-band management network.

An out-of-band (OoB) management is a solution that provides a secure alternate route to your IT network using the local network. This alternate path is designed to isolate network administration traffic from normal user traffic. This isolation allows you to troubleshoot a potential threat while preventing compromised user devices or malicious network traffic from impacting operations or the infrastructure. 

Only use ports that you need.

Because hackers can exploit them and use them to enter your network, block obsolete or unused ports and protocols at the outermost layer of your network’s security (e.g., firewall, ISP, etc.) and disable them in device configurations. 

Implement a demilitarized zone in your network.

A demilitarized zone (DMZ) acts as the network’s exposed point to untrusted networks (i.e., the Internet). Because Internet-facing services such as email, web servers, and DNS servers are most vulnerable to attacks, isolating in a monitored subnetwork such as a DMZ helps protect the rest of the network in the event that they become compromised.

Document every move.

Enable and implement robust logging or documenting of Internet-facing services and authentication functions within your network. Always keep an eye out for any signs of compromise or credential misuse, particularly within cloud environments.

Always be on guard.

Adopt a mindset that a compromise can happen at any time. Prepare for incident response activities to ensure that they are performed properly in the event of an actual breach. When a breach does occur, make sure you communicate about it on out-of-band channels. Also see to it that you uncover a breach’s full scope before remediating it.

Partner with a trusted team of IT pros

Cyber threat mitigation and remediation are both highly technical processes. As much as healthcare practice owners would want to be hands-on in their clinic’s cybersecurity, the safest and most practical way to handle this would be to work closely with IT experts. 

ER Tech Pros is a managed IT services provider that offers IT, cloud, compliance, and cybersecurity support specifically to healthcare practices. With a HIPAA-certified team and HIPAA-compliant tools, ER Tech can help your practice avoid, mitigate, and recover from cyber threats.