Protecting Against Ransomware in Hospitals and its Medical Devices

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ransomware medical devices

Ransomware attacks have grown to a point where it is no longer just known to the IT industry, but also in the mainstream. Ransomware attacks have risen over the past years, from consumers to even specialized industries like healthcare. It can cause sudden loss of data if threat actors choose to keep stolen data encrypted. Another overlooked risk is the disruption of services that the affected experience during an attack. This is even more critical for specialized services like healthcare which handle the lives of its patients.

Healthcare organizations like hospitals rely heavily on computer systems to run their operations. Threat actors know that any disruption to this system can heavily affect the care given to their patients. With lives at stake, the affected healthcare organization has no choice but to pay even if they don’t have the resources. Attackers even go the extra step to research what the absolute limit of ransom an organization can pay.

2019 had an incident where a facility in the US was hit by ransomware. This incident disabled the organizations access to patient records and medical devices. This was a case where unfortunately, due to the medical systems being down, a life of a baby was lost.

While there is no foolproof way to prevent ransomware attacks, there are ways to lessen the risk. This comes in the form of a multitude of IT security solutions that can help detect the attacks or even backup solutions that can help restore data before the attack. However, Operational Technology (OT) like medical devices also need to be considered as it is a lesser-known entry point.

This is where solutions like Trend Micro’s TXOne solutions can help the healthcare industry.

TXOne to Secure OT

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The security experts at Trend Micro have done the research for you. From the industry standards to hospital processes, they know where the security vulnerabilities lie and created a solution that complements it. Below are a few ways in which TXOne can help healthcare’s OT security:

  • Effective network segmentation, virtual patch (IPS) and network containment through robust network appliances, preventing ransomware propagation
  • Granular control over healthcare protocols with support for 50+ variant IT and OT protocols for hospital network access control (HL7, DICOM, Modbus and more)
  • Lock down mission-critical endpoint assets using whitelisting technology, immunizing your system to ransomware
  • Quickly and conveniently remove ransomware via our plug-and-scan USB technology
  • Provide central and individual management options perfectly suited to different management roles

To learn more on how to better protect your business from ransomware, you can email us at marketing@www.ctlink.com.ph!

University Medical Center Groningen: Citrix Endpoint Management Case Study

University Medical Center Groningen: Citrix Endpoint Management Case Study

As one of the largest hospitals in the Netherlands, the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) boasts close to 11,000 employees and have a wide number of patients who come for various reasons.  May it be for basic care, specialized diagnostics or even examinations, the doctors, nurses, and support staff work to give their patients the best of their abilities.

The Challenge: Organizational adopting mobility

Usually, most sensitive care data would be placed in one secure safe.  However, with the industry growing with more specializations, data must be now shared to multiple people who need it like specialists, general practitioners, peripheral hospitals and even the patient themselves.  Even employees are now becoming more mobile and not just working in the hospital but working even on the move or at home using their own devices.  These can cause security risks for UMCG if not properly addressed.

The Solution: Citrix Endpoint Management

UMCG has been a long user of Citrix solutions, they have been using Xendesktop (now known as Virtual Desktop) on thin clients before they considered Citrix as a way to alleviate their current problems.  To help solve their current issue, they are looking to use Citrix Endpoint Management (Formerly Xenmobile) and Citrix Sharefile.  With the use of Citrix Endpoint Management, UMCG was able to lower their investments, let them have a better picture of their environment while giving them more flexibility.  They were even given the preference to have their Citrix Endpoint management housed in their own data center. This is crucial for safety and redundancy to ensure its continuity and performance as it is a business-critical system with 5000 mobile devices.

With so many devices, not all of them would be feasible to be company owned.  Therefore, UMCG has opted to use Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) structure.  However, to ensure that the network is secured, UMCG has imposed if they were to choose a BYOD then they would need to install a Citrix Agent on said device to ensure that Citrix can manage the security of the network.

To UMCG, the Citrix mobility solution achieved their goal of making their information as available and consistent as possible. It helped isolate data to ensure that their data was secured in a sandbox environment while also giving them a simplistic approach to manage their mobile devices.  This worked well since they were already existing Citrix customers, making the integration process smoother.


To learn more about Citrix solutions, you can contact us at 8893 9515 and we would be happy to answer your inquiries!

Five Data Protection Requirements in Healthcare that Unitrends can Help you Solve

Five Data Protection Requirements in Healthcare that Unitrends can Help you Solve

When it comes to business continuity, the healthcare industry faces many unique requirements and challenges.  With the need of 24 hours, 7 days a week and 365 days availability, and the need to safeguard the content of their electronic health records (EHRs), it can be a hard task to fulfill while still keeping within a reasonable budget.

This is where Unitrends can help.  Below are a few unique requirements that the healthcare industry faces and how the Unitrends solution meets to solve them.

  1. Uptime Requirements

When it comes to recovery time objectives (RTO), most industries have them in hours as they have more time to work with.  This doesn’t follow for the healthcare industry as they need their RTOs in a matter of seconds or minutes.

Unitrends Instant Recovery can failover applications in literally seconds. Unitrends Recovery Assurance delivers automated recovery testing, site and application failover, ransomware detection, and disaster recovery compliance, both locally and in the Unitrends Cloud.

  1. Highly Targeted by Ransomware

Due to the nature of healthcare, data of patients are critical for the business to function.  Ransomware criminals are aware of this and that is why the industry is a prime target.

Unitrends products can do security scans against your production applications – but using your backup data instead. It can spin up your applications in a specific order, isolate them from production, execute security tests, and automate reports and alerts immediately upon detection of ransomware

  1. Highly Regulated

For companies that need to work with the Protected Health Information (PHI) must ensure that all the required physical, network, and process security measures are in place, well documented and strictly followed.  This is required by HIPAA.

Unitrends offers a portfolio of 15 all-in-one enterprise physical appliances that are pre-loaded and pre-tuned with powerful software that not only covers on-premises backup but also long-term retention and disaster recovery in the HIPAA compliant Unitrends Cloud.

  1. Must Control Highly Proprietary Data

Healthcare IT must know where their physical data is located at all times of the lifecycle as well as control who can access it.

Unitrends Recovery Series and Unitrends Backup software can replicate data locally, to a remote site or to the HIPAA-compliant Unitrends Cloud. From any of those locations data can be stored for long term retention and / or used for disaster recovery purposes.

  1. Support Large Numbers of Non-computer Savvy Users

Usually, the general staff of healthcare are considered to be beginners or illiterate when it comes to new IT related technologies that have come out in the recent years.  This makes them very prone to mistakes which in turn can keep their IT counterparts quite busy.

With a common and intuitive user interface across all products, even untrained IT staff can easily find individual files in backups. A few clicks and the entire recovery process, from login to file restoration usually takes less than 5 minutes.


To learn more about Unitrends, you may contact us at 8893-9515 and we would be happy to help you!

Citrix Case Study: Saint Francis Hospital

Citrix Case Study: Saint Francis Hospital

Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center is an acute care hospital located in Hartford, Connecticut. Since its founding by the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Chambéry in 1897, Saint Francis has grown into New England’s largest Catholic hospital, with 617 beds and major clinical concentrations in oncology, cardiology, orthopedics, rehabilitation, and women and infant services.

The challenge: Consolidating 34 legacy applications into a single EMR Platform and addressing their Mobile device risk growth.

As an early innovator in the healthcare industry, they were already deploying computerized physician entry (CPOE) systems far back as 20 years ago.  This was at the time before patient management software were an American healthcare standard.  At present however, the IT leaders in the organization have recognized that they need to simplify and consolidate their 34 legacy applications into a single unified electronic medical record (EMR) platform if they want to continue to be ahead of the industry.  This is especially challenging when considering that a majority of the hospital’s doctor’s work in independent offices.

The Solution: Deploying a new EMR system across thousands of workstations and mobile devices

Saint Francis had already been using Citrix technology for years, specifically Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenApp (now VirtualDesktop and VirtualApp respectively).  These products helped Saint Francis with their on-demand application delivery for both their physical and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).  However, the main problem they encountered after they did a preliminary security audit was that there were security gaps due to the approach they took with mobile devices.  So to ensure that they kept their users empowered with the choice of their own device, they decided to also use XenMobile to help lessen the security threats. “When XenMobile arrived on the scene, we were able to get all the features we wanted, along with a simple licensing package from a vendor we already trusted.” Says Paul Dzierwinski, manager of systems administration at Saint Francis.

After 18 months of preparation, the hospital was successful in transferring their 1.3 million patient records in a smooth rollout.

Key Benefits

Helping ensure the timely launch of a new enterprise-wide platform

  • The team checked with all workstations to ensure that during launch period that each endpoint would run smoothly.

Facilitating the exchange of patient information and reducing medical errors

  • The streamlined EMR system helped convenience customers so that patient records could be shared securely via the system to the intended recipient, be it hospitals, doctors or healthcare entities.

Enabling anytime, anywhere access to EMR data as part of a larger BYOD initiative

  • The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiative has helped end users have a seamless experience while making sure that Saint Francis has a degree of control for security, being able to wipe a lost phone is one of the possibilities.

To learn more about Citrix products, you can visit our product page or you may contact us at 893-9515 and we would be happy to help you!

Pure Storage: Why All-Flash storage is the next Critical Step for PACS and VNA Solutions

Pure Storage: Why All-Flash storage is the next Critical Step for PACS and VNA Solutions

Presently, Healthcare organizations are becoming more reliant on their enterprise imaging systems to improve their overall quality of service they provide to their clients.  However, as growth in size and scope continues for imaging, those responsible for constructing and managing the Picture Archiving Communication Systems (PACS) and Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) solutions will have to handle various new and potentially difficult challenges.  However, within these challenges lies opportunities to improve patient care with storage upgrades to support the PACS and VNA solutions.

Challenges

With major advances in both imaging technology and information technology, clinicians now have the means to use a broader range of images from across the entire health system to make better and informed decisions when it comes to their clients care.  Also, as the system continues to expand in size and scope, more advanced analytics will be available to improve the progress of treating patients.

This means administrators of PACS and VNA play a bigger role, making sure delivery of performance to the point of care and meeting more stringent requirements for images, including availability, business continuity and compliance.  This means dealing with capacity growth while making sure that images are readily available and not stored in an archive that is inaccessible or unable to meet the performance requirements of the image and viewer.  They must also align their systems to their customer needs, be it current or future customers.

How all-flash storage can help

Legacy spinning disk arrays do not have the performance level to meet the demands of today’s enterprise imaging solutions unless they are replaced or upgraded.  Hybrid systems have been tried by some organizations using flash as cache or as one of several storage tiers.  However these solutions failed to deliver consistent performance needed for the PACS and VNA systems making it very difficult on the part of the administrators during its operations.  This makes it clear that to optimally run these systems, single-tiered all-flash storage solutions is the only viable option.  Below are some of the key benefits in using an all flash array

Simplified manageability

An all-flash array will typically mean faster deployments, simpler scaling and less complex ongoing management and maintenance. With the right all-flash platform, administrators can use automation to eliminate a wide range of manual tasks— with no need to ever undertake an expensive and risky forklift upgrade.

A single storage tier

This is valuable from a number of perspectives. In terms of performance, using a single tier of high-performance storage means that images are always available and on storage that can ensure quick and easy access. In terms of manageability, a single tier eliminates manual processes and the myriad tasks involved in managing the cache. In terms of cost effectiveness, a single storage tier means no need to manage archives and older storage platforms that are becoming obsolete.

A future-proof infrastructure

All-flash storage is clearly the future for PACS and VNA systems, so there is really no point in waiting. With all-flash storage, PACS and VNA systems can deliver major improvements in performance, agility, availability and manageability. With the right solution, administrators can stay current with the latest technology without having to replace infrastructure and migrate applications, images and data. In addition, flash storage is the only storage platform that can deliver the performance required for modern initiatives such as big data analytics, machine learning and radiomics.

To learn more about PACS and VNA solutions with Pure Storage, you may check this link here.  If you want to learn more about all-flash storage, you can visit our Pure Storage product page or contact us directly at 893-9515.