NEW ZEALAND HEALTH GETS CYBER SMART WITH CYBERSCIENT AND CYBERSHIELD
Why being cyber smart matters?
We’ve all seen the local and international news on cyber security incidents affecting health organisations, hospitals, and even crippling entire healthcare systems and critical infrastructures, disrupting patient service delivery, and leaving patient’s privacy and health at risk of serious harm.
CERT NZ’s latest report shows a 65% increase in reports of cyber security incidents over the past year, with an associated $16.9 million in direct financial losses, with stats that may be underestimated as many incidents are not reported and accounted for.
This threat landscape is amplified by the challenging Covid-19 pandemic and the overall health digital transformation, making cyber security the number one business risk that cannot be avoided, only managed.While the effects of a cyber security incident can be catastrophic, it is possible to avoid or minimise impacts and risks by taking simple steps to get cyber smart and manage cyber security risks, starting with a cyber risk assessment, threat identification and awareness training.
What is the pulse of New Zealand health cyber landscape?
Trusted by many healthcare organisations and with deep understanding of health and critical infrastructures Medical IT Advisors has been working for the last years with providers, non-profits, government, and industry partners to detect, protect, respond and adapt to cyber attacks, constantly improving and developing community services and initiatives.
Medical IT Advisors has kept a finger on the New Zealand health cyber pulse with their security operations for health and SMEs, managing the only Health Threat Intelligence Platform in New Zealand, feeding into the CyberShield.NZ DNS protection services.
Medical IT Advisors gained visibility on the thousands of attacks hitting healthcare organisations every day and has seen an increase in phishing, ransomware and hacks that are consistent with the global threat landscape. This cyber threat visibility is turned every day into actionable insights and shared within the community, health and beyond, with some examples below.
As early adopters of the NZ Health Threat Intelligence Platform Chief Information and Security Officer at healthAlliance Richard Harrison says, “access to threat intelligence is a key pillar of a security strategy and a collaborative approach to the sharing of cyber threat indicators and intelligence is critical to long-term success”.
The DNS filtering service was done in collaboration with InternetNZ and its commercial director David Morrison said they realised the value of adding local threat feeds such as the NZ Health Threat Intelligence Sharing Platform, “The health sector holds a lot of sensitive personal data and we are seeing a rise in cyber activity, particularly over this Covid-19 period. Any organisation that holds high value data should be thinking of themselves as a target and protecting themselves from attack,” he said.
CyberShield has been implemented as a zero-touch network protection service that is now defending hundreds of kiwi organisations from everyday phish, ransomware, botnet and online threats, at the same time providing a feedback loop and pulse on the latest attacks.
How to get more CyberScient?
Medical IT Advisors recent initiative focused on increasing cyber security awareness using self-assessment, training and testing using the online platform CyberScient.com that provides a free Kickstarter programme to help organisations learn how to protect against online threats and cyber risks.It all started with a desire to help all businesses lift their cyber posture since SMEs are at risk more than ever before, doing nothing is no longer an option and Medical IT Advisors wanted to provide their customers and community with a cost-effective solution.
“We consider that cyber security services should be easy and accessible to everyone and that’s why CyberScient platform empowers users to recognise and identify cyber security threats such as phishing and malware like ransomware, as well as less obvious risks related to how they handle information. This provides a dire needed simplified risk assessment and baseline process, cyber policy templates, including check lists of best practices that organisations can adapt to their needs around things like email and passwords, asset management and critical security controls as “everyone needs to know what assets they have, what to protect and how”, says Medical IT Advisors’ CEO Faustin Roman.Faustin explains CyberScient can “act as a human firewall as users get better at identifying threats and sharing information securely with one another.”
Mark Corbitt, CEO of Patients First, supports the initiative and said “cyber security awareness, training, and testing is important to all businesses whatever their size. Capability and expertise like that provided by CyberScient through Medical IT Advisors provides a way for companies to understand and begin to meet some of the cyber risks and consequent vulnerabilities in their businesses.”
CyberScient has seen a very rapid adoption in New Zealand, Australia and beyond, with its most appreciated and unique advantages being the fresh phishing testing samples adapted to the latest threats seen by the NZ Health Threat Intel. Faustin recommends adopting an “assume breach” culture and having a cloud-first Zero Trust security strategy using threat informed defence tactics. His current focus is on assisting customers with security operations, incident response trainings and cloud migrations on Microsoft 365, Azure and AWS platforms.
Medical IT Advisors is proud to help its customers and community uplift their cyber security maturity and invites everyone to join the active collabor-action from sharing cyber threat intelligence, doing a free cyber risk assessment, or engaging in awareness training and testing services.
Find out how to get started on CyberScient.com and CyberShield.NZ
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Read the article on Hinz.nz: https://ebooks.hinz.nz/view/
