Preventing patient data leaks

patient data leaks

6 ways to protect patient data in your eClinical and digital health applications Patient data leaks is much more than patient privacy.  Patient data leaks require a more complete approach to threat mitigation of patient data leakage, availability and data integrity attacks. Since 2019, we see rapidly increased use of decentralized clinical trials, hybrid trials, […]

Dealing with DLP and privacy

Dealing with DLP and privacy It’s a long hot summer here in the Middle East and with 2/3 of  the office out on vacation, you have some time to reflect on data security. Or on the humidity.  Or on a cold beer. Maybe you are working on building a business case for DLP technology like Websense or Symantec or Verdasys, or Mcafee or Fidelis in […]

Shock therapy for medical device malware

Israel has over 700 medical device vendors.  Sometimes it seems like half of them are attaching to the cloud and the other are developing mobile apps for all kinds of crazy, innovative applications like Healthy.io ( Visual Input Turned Into Powerful Medical Insight – translation: an app that lets you do urine analysis using your smart phone). […]

How to Save Your Data and Reputation if You Lose Your BlackBerry

5 years ago, an analysis we did of 150 data breach events showed that over 40% of the data breach events were due to stolen or lost hardware devices (Download the free research article on data breach here Business Threat Modeling Study). Stolen or lost devices were in a close second place to data being stolen […]

Why security defenses are a mistake

Security defenses don’t improve our understanding of the root causes of data breaches Why is this so? Because when you defend against a data breach – you do not necessarily understand the vulnerabilities that can be exploited. If do not understand the root causes of your vulnerabilities, how can you justify and measure the effectiveness of […]

The dangers of default passwords – 37% of Data Breaches Found to be Malicious Attacks

A malicious attack by malware or spear phishing on valuable data assets like PHI (protected health information) exploits known vulnerabilities  and one of the most common vulnerabilities in medical devices and healthcare IT systems is default passwords. “Researchers Billy Rios and Terry McCorkle of Cylance have reported a hard-coded password vulnerability affecting a wide variety of […]

Five things a healthcare CIO can do to improve security

A metaphor I like to use with clients compares security vulnerabilities with seismic fault lines. As long as the earth doesn’t move – you’re safe, but once things start moving sideways – you can drop into a big hole. Most security vulnerabilities reside in the cracks of systems and organizational integration and during an M&A, those […]

Beyond the firewall

Beyond the firewall – data loss prevention What a simple idea. It doesn’t matter how they break into your network or servers – if attackers can’t take out your data, then you’ve mitigated the threat. Data loss prevention is a category of information security products that has matured from Web / email content filtering products […]

Free risk assessment of your web site

With all the news about credit card breaches, there are probably a lot of people scurrying about trying to figure out the cheapest and fastest way to reduce the risk of some Saudi hacker stealing credit cards or mounting a DDOS attack on their web site. I have written here, here and here about how […]

How to reduce risk of a data breach

Historical data in  log files  has little intrinsic value in the here-and-now process of event response and mediation and compliance check lists have little direct value in protecting customers. Software Associates specializes in helping medical device and healthcare vendors achieve HIPAA compliance and improve the data and software security of their products in hospital and […]