FEATURE : ENDPOINT SECURITY

With the healthcare sector in Australia suffering unprecedented attacks on endpoints , Greg Foss , Senior Cybersecurity Strategist at VMware Carbon Black , tells us how IT leaders can ensure effective endpoint protection with the result that security teams can benefit from the full visibility and control required to prevent , detect and respond to endpoint threats .

no industry was impacted and forced to innovate and transform as quickly as healthcare in 2020 . Whether it was the rapid development of COVID-19 testing technology or the explosion of telehealth , healthcare organizations accelerated Digital Transformation in record time . But with these innovations came new and unprecedented security vulnerabilities that cybercriminals quickly looked to exploit and profit from .

In Australia , cyberattacks on the healthcare sector are also set to increase with the warnings from the Australian Cybersecurity Center ( ACSC ) to Australian healthcare providers that it had observed an increase in cyberincidents targeting the sector . In addition , the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner ( OAIC ) also reported the healthcare sector as the top industry sector accounting for 22 % of the breaches in its July to December 2020 Notifiable Data Breaches Report .

According to VMware Carbon Black , in the latter half of the year , we saw the attempted attacks per endpoint peak with an 87 % increase from September to October . The timing of this significant spike corresponds with the October alert from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency ( CISA ), which warned of increased cyberattacks by a Ryuk ransomware gang specifically targeting healthcare organizations .

We are now also seeing ‘ secondary infections ’ which are leveraged to facilitate long-term cyberattack campaigns , happening across the digital healthcare supply chain and have led to a surge of extortions and helped fuel a cybercrime market . Our research found protected health information ( PHI ) being bought and sold on Dark Web markets as cybercriminals look for the easiest way to cash in on data .

According to Greg Foss , Senior Cybersecurity Strategist at VMware Carbon Black , in 2020 we saw ransomware go mainstream . The wide-reaching impact of ransomware has been assisted largely by way of affiliate programs . With many ransomware groups offering Ransomware-As-a-Service ( RaaS ), making the deployment of ransomware easily accessible to

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