The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reports that from 2020 to 2022, the number of hacking events involving 700 or more people grew by 45%. This data should be taken into consideration if your company regularly processes electronic protected health information (ePHI).
What are the most frequent attacks to be on the lookout for and how can you defend against them if cybersecurity attacks are on the rise?
Phishing
Phishing is a type of attack in which a perpetrator pretends to be someone else in order to convince a victim to divulge important information, typically by email.
Learning how to recognize a phishing scam and teaching your staff the same is one approach to protect yourself against it. Additionally, your company must to have a set policy in place to adhere to in the event that any unusual or suspicious messages are received.
According to the Security Rule, every employee must regularly participate in a security awareness and training programme. This guarantees that everyone who has access to ePHI is knowledgeable about the most recent cybersecurity dangers and knows how to protect themselves from them.
One method used by many businesses is to simulate phishing emails and send them to employees to see how they react. They keep track of opens, reports of questionable emails, and other things.
This will provide management a better idea of how knowledgeable staff members are about this kind of scam so they can tailor future training accordingly.
In order to supplement staff knowledge and training, we also advise putting anti-malware software on all organisational devices. Before emails reach employees’ inboxes, effective anti-malware software can help warn or even block specific communications.
Weak Cybersecurity Practices
It should be obvious that having strong cybersecurity procedures is necessary if you wish to have a robust defence against cybersecurity threats. Compromised or brute-forced credentials are used in over 80% of hacking-related breaches.
We advise using 2FA as soon as you can, coupled with a password manager like LastPass that will assist you in creating strong passwords and storing them. With just one master password to remember, managing your accounts becomes considerably simpler right away.
Exploiting Known Vulnerabilities
Another frequent method of data breaching, in addition to phishing and lax cybersecurity procedures, is exploiting existing flaws. A vulnerability is considered known if the public is aware of its existence. Information about recognised vulnerabilities is stored in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD).
Numerous mobile devices, servers, desktop operating systems, apps, online software, firewalls, firmware, databases, and mobile device operating systems all have easy exploitable vulnerabilities. This is why it
‘s crucial to upgrade and patch systems on a regular basis to close security flaws and issues that expose data to risk. If a vulnerability is found, it may occasionally be essential to deactivate specific services or applications until a fix is found.