Two California cybersecurity companies have joined forces to help protect healthcare networks from cyber-threats.
CynergisTek and Awake Security announced yesterday that they are pooling resources to develop an online threat assessment program that healthcare organizations can use to identify attacker activity.
Ben Denkers, CynergisTek SVP of security and privacy services, said the partnership was conceived after the outbreak of COVID-19 changed the medical world's working practices.
“As America’s hospitals scrambled to respond to the pandemic, the entire threat landscape and the associated attack surface completely changed, placing America’s hospitals squarely in the cross hairs for adversarial activity," said Denkers.
"New vulnerabilities from telemedicine combined with an increased network footprint due to work-from-home employees means we have a perfect storm for increased cyber-attacks."
As part of the partnership, both companies are "assembling the best minds in networking, machine learning, data science, cybersecurity, privacy, and compliance to help healthcare organizations get a more complete view and understanding of their potential attack surface, including every user, medical device, and application on the network."
The aim is to enable hospitals to track every asset in their network, whether it's moved on-premises or by remote users working in the cloud. Assistance will be given to help healthcare organizations identify high-risk incidents and compromised entities without the need for agents, manual configuration, or complex integrations.
"This partnership allows us to identify adversarial activity including reconnaissance in its early stages, allowing organizations to re-baseline their security posture as they return to normal operations,” said Denkers.
The new compromise assessment will be powered by Awake Security's network detection and response technology and offered to CynergisTek's customer base of more than 1,000 healthcare organizations.
“Sensitive healthcare data is extremely valuable to hackers, and we know they aren’t sitting on the sidelines during the pandemic but are in fact attacking both hospitals and pharmaceutical companies during this volatile time,” said Rahul Kashyap, CEO of Awake Security.
"In times like this, we’re excited to help healthcare entities for this ‘all-hands-on-deck’ moment to bolster their defenses and prevent crises from emerging and impacting patients.”