11 Ways to Prevent Security Breaches in Healthcare
- #1 Evaluate the Current Condition of Your IT Infrastructure.
- #2 Create Different Levels of Access.
- #3 Subnet Wireless Networks.
- #4 Keep Track of Personal Devices.
- #5 Educate Your Employees.
- #6 Modernize Obsolete IT Infrastructure.
- #7 Update Your Software Regularly.
More items
Which of the following can be used to prevent data breach?
Train & Educate Your Staff – After completing your security policy audits, you can then enforce a written employee policy around data privacy and security. You will want to hold regular security trainings so that all employees are aware of these newly created policies – after all, people cannot voluntarily comply with unfamiliar policies.
Controlling end user access and privileges as it relates to the common policy called “least privilege” The use of various, unique passwords on computers or other devices used for work purposes Implement a documented system for departing employees, and vendors/contractors (passwords, key cards, laptop access, etc.) Train employees on the importance of reporting suspicious data security leakage or data security breaches Create a policy that describes how employees should handle, dispose of, retrieve, and send data
Employees also need training on the types of modern phishing attacks. As discussed in our ransomware blog, phishing is the most common way for ransomware to spread within an organization. If you can train and educate your employees about the pitfalls and indicators to look for in a “phishy” looking email, your organization will be well served.
What are the 3 natures of data privacy breaches?
(a) Availability breach resulting from loss, accidental, or unlawful destruction of personal data, (b) Integrity breach resulting from alternation of personal data, (c) Confidentiality breach resulting from the unauthorized disclosure of or access to personal data.
What is a proactive strategy for minimizing data breaches?
Implement access controls – By controlling access to sensitive data and systems, companies can prevent data breaches by unauthorized users. Implementing strict authorization processes for authorized users is a way to minimize the risk of data breaches,
Passwords Two-factor authentication, and Other security measures
It’s important to limit access to sensitive information only to those who need it to perform their job functions. Additionally, you should regularly review access controls to ensure that they are appropriate and up-to-date.
What are the 4 pillars of data protection?
Data, a crucial asset for the modern business, is under attack. Data breaches, ransomware, employee theft, and mistakes can each cause significant harm to your company, customers, and reputation. There are four pillars of data protection for the modern enterprise.
They consist of governance, assessment, training, and response. Governance Governance is the second pillar of data protection for it provides the direction for cybersecurity within the organization. Governance consists of the policies and procedures established by top management as well as the organizational systems and frameworks used to manage cybersecurity.
Curt Dukes, Executive Vice President for the Center for Internet Security, said on Modern Workplace, “The job of the C-suite is to make money and not have a material adverse impact.” However, the average employee should not have to determine as to whether their decision will have a material adverse impact because interpretations of that may vary widely with the knowledge each employee has of the company, associated risks, and the impact of the decision.
- Rather, the company determines what a material adverse impact is and defines policy to establish the requirements to avoid such an impact.
- Procedures follow policies by outlining the specific tasks that will be performed to accomplish the goals set out in policy.
- Documented procedures assist in standardizing tasks so that they are performed consistently and correctly.
The last element of the governance pillar is the management framework that keeps the cybersecurity machine running within the organization. This includes those persons responsible for overseeing cybersecurity, those who provide input into cybersecurity such as steering committees, as well as external entities such as audit or independent testing or review companies.
- Assessment Assessment is the first pillar because it is often the prerequisite for other controls to be effective.
- Assessment provides the context for implementing security controls.
- The primary goal of assessment is to clearly identify the assets and data that the organization has as well as where it is located.
The next step is to determine what contractual and regulatory requirements exist surrounding the data. Business associates, companies working with the government, or those impacted by GDPR are required to handle data in specific ways, so it is essential to identify these requirements at the forefront.
- Next, companies must define those who should have access to it.
- Various methods exist for this including discretionary and non-discretionary access control, but the most common practice is to define roles and determine the access associated with a role.
- When people are hired to perform a role, they are given those privileges.
Depending on the granularity with which roles are defined and the size and level of specialization in the company, some roles may not adequately describe the activities that a person performs. Some may be too broad and others somewhat skewed. In such cases, a task-based approach may be used.
The last assessment element is a risk assessment. Organizations should review the risks to their data, the value of the data and cost of losing the data, and the cost of various solutions. Solutions may include implementing additional security controls to remediate the risk, transferring the risk through insurance, avoiding the risk by changing the process or utilizing some other method, or accepting the risk.
Remediation options take into consideration best practices, standards, and regulatory requirements. Training The third pillar of data protection is training. Employees are a potential weak point in many organizations. They are given access to sensitive data and attackers target them with increasingly convincing social engineering schemes or just happen to catch them when they are off-guard.
- Evan Anderson, CEO of INVNT/IP, in the Modern Workplace episode, ” Information protection: Guarding your digital assets,” highlights training as an important element of protecting digital assets.
- Training keeps employees up-to-date with the skills to recognize and foil attacks targeting them and helps to maintain cybersecurity vigilance.
Training also educates employees on company cybersecurity expectations through policy and procedure training. For example, each employee should know who they would contact to report a suspected cybersecurity incident and relevant incident indicators. Response The fourth pillar is response.
There will come a time when controls prove less than effective for a situation, and systems become unavailable, or data confidentiality or integrity is compromised. Business continuity and disaster recovery plans establish procedures for data resiliency to maintain systems at an organizationally-mandated availability level.
If the company can only tolerate five minutes of downtime a year, systems will need to be put in place to stay operational when components, sites, software, power, or other pieces of the system fail. Additionally, maintenance activities will need to be constructed in such a way as to preserve availability.
- Similarly, loss of data confidentiality through a data breach or other unauthorized disclosure or the loss of data integrity through an attack such as ransomware will require some response effort.
- Incident response includes investigating the incident, containing the situation, assessing the impact, notifying impacted individuals, restoring data, and remediating the issues leading to the root cause.
Response efforts are far more reliable and less costly when there is an associated plan. Generally, the more refined the plan, the more effective the response. Communication plans should also be developed for possible situations. Communication plans clearly identify what will be said, who will say it, which customers, partners, employees, or governing bodies will be notified, and appropriate channels to use.
- Organizations lacking a communication plan may find employees talking to the press or customer notifications sent out too early or too late or without a clear explanation.
- Recent breaches only serve to demonstrate the value a defined communication plan can have on customer perceptions, stock value, regulatory fines, and liability.
Applying the four pillars Foreign governments, competitors, thieves, extortionists, and mistakes may all threaten your data. The threat is prevalent and powerful. According to the Microsoft Office Modern Workplace episode, ” Information protection: Guarding your digital assets,” half of departing employees leave with confidential data, intentionally or unintentionally.
What is the golden rule of data protection?
Applying Legal Concepts to Data Privacy – Instead of venturing into abstract legal philosophy to figure out exactly what that means for data privacy in our daily lives, we can obtain a strong and fairly accurate barometer of how data privacy laws should evolve by looking at five simple principles we can all understand:
- Laws should promote and defend honesty;
- Laws should promote and defend transparency;
- Laws should promote and protect the commitments we make to one another;
- Laws should protect us from harm and punish those that purposely cause harm; and
- Evolutions in law should be based upon objective measures of society’s goals and needs.
When the law wrestles with a new issue, such as data privacy, the easiest way to determine how to act legally and ethically is to follow these five guideposts. What many folks do at this point in the analysis, unfortunately, is become distracted by the cacophony of voices and companies out there that have already waded into this conversation with their own sense of data privacy, and their own sense of right and wrong.
We’ve heard this play out with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony in front of Congress, press releases, and privacy policy “updates” from every tech company imaginable, and even in private conversations over dinner when we verbally tussle with family and friends over the benefits and drawbacks of a dating app telling potential suitors our location, or whether targeted ads are helpful or creepy.
With Constitutional rights to privacy at stake, not to mention the greater implications of companies and governments knowing too much about who we are and what we do in our private lives, we need to set the record straight on how the law should form and how companies should behave when dealing with our private data.
What is the most effective method to protect data?
1. Encryption – Encryption is a fundamental component for protecting personal data. It involves converting sensitive information into a coded form, making it unreadable to anyone without the proper decryption key. Only the authorized user, who possesses the decryption key, is able to decode and view the information. One of the key benefits of encryption is that it offers a high level of security, even in the event of a data breach. If encrypted data is stolen or otherwise accessed by an unauthorized party, it will be unreadable and therefore, useless to the attacker.
- Additionally, encryption also helps organizations comply with privacy regulations and standards, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
- However, encryption is not foolproof and must be implemented properly to be effective.
For example, if the encryption key is lost or stolen, the encrypted data will be inaccessible, even to the legitimate owner. Additionally, encryption algorithms can be broken, particularly if they are not updated to keep up with advances in technology and attacks by malicious actors.