Tales from the Trenches: Vol 6 — Barely-Passive Aggressive

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Since 2004, RedSeal has helped our customers See and Secure their entire complex network. And while those customers may have understood the value of understanding their environment, how it was connected and see what’s at risk, there is often an “Aha” moment when the true significance is clear. The stories of these moments are lore within the walls of RedSeal. But these tales so clearly illustrate the value of RedSeal beyond just theory that we think they’re worth sharing. In the words of our team in the field, the ones working directly with our customers, this blog series will share the moments where it all gets real.

In this edition of the series Bill Burge, RedSeal Professional Services shows the network as configured, not necessarily as designed, with RedSeal.

Barely-Passive Aggressive

While working with a global reach chip manufacturer, a new member was added to those who helped manage RedSeal.

He had spent over a dozen years working his way up the Network Operations group to become one of their top network architects, and his knowledge of the network was determined to be of great value to the Security Architecture group.

As we were reviewing some of the RedSeal findings and giving him a tour of the capabilities of the deployment, it was pretty obvious he was neither impressed nor entertained. With his history of designing, building, and managing the network; he was almost offended that some product could tell him ANYTHING that he didn’t already know about his network.

Reviewing Model Issues, specifically Overlapping Subnets, I’m explaining how there can be multiple reasons why they might exist, but many times they are a simple typo in a netmask. We found such an example.

He proceeds to dig into the config with the intent of showing us how “RedSeal got it wrong”. (I’m preparing for this to spiral into a very bad scene.)
He finds the line, and he finds the typo.

The room gets REAL quiet and I’m holding my breath. Finally, he sits back in his chair and visibly deflates. He then offers “That’s probably been in there for over a DECADE!”
Then he starts laughing and says “I’m probably the person that put it in there!”

After that, he wanted to see “everything!”
He says “There’s 18 months worth of work to fix just the things I’ve seen today!”  His teammates point out to him: “Yes, but it’s not YOUR job anymore to fix it.” (Big smile.)

Interested in how RedSeal can help your team? Click here to set up a demo or an introductory call.

How to Navigate the Shifting Healthcare Cybersecurity Landscape

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Cyberattacks and data breaches in the healthcare sector are increasing at an alarming rate, especially during the pandemic when patient communications and records moved online.

Between March 2021 and February 2022, over 42,076,805 healthcare records were exposed. Businesses lose an average of $10.10 million per healthcare data breach, while lost or stolen protected health information (PHI) and personally identifiable information (PII) cost the U.S. healthcare industry billions of dollars annually.

Valuable data makes healthcare organizations a prime target for cybercriminals. Meanwhile, the fast-shifting technology landscape makes it more challenging than ever to keep up with the latest cybersecurity best practices.

Let’s look at the many factors causing today’s cybersecurity nightmare and how you can navigate the changing healthcare cybersecurity landscape with the right technology and processes.

The Healthcare Sector Faces Ongoing Cybersecurity Challenges

The healthcare industry is complex. Various factors have come together in recent years to create the perfect storm for bad actors to breach networks and steal data.

High-Value Target Data: PHI and medical records are sought after by criminals because they’re worth 10 to 20 times the value of credit card data on the dark web. Meanwhile, biomedical and pharmaceutical research and development data drive a $160-billion industry. Criminals can often use the stolen credential to breach multiple targeted systems, giving threat actors many ways to cause damage through lateral movements.

Fast Adoption of New Technologies: The healthcare industry has been implementing connected medical devices (medical IoT) at a rapid pace. The equipment often uses unregulated mobile applications for processing and transmitting PHI and PII. Additionally, many facilities don’t have the proper security protocols to support the proliferation of devices connected to their networks — creating a large attack surface cybercriminals can exploit.

Overworked and Undertrained Personnel: Employee training is key to preventing social engineering schemes, phishing scams, and ransomware attacks — after all, it takes only one staff member to open one malicious attachment to infect the entire system. However, many healthcare facilities fail to provide sufficient cybersecurity education to their employees. Even end users with the knowledge and best intention often let their guard down because of environmental factors, such as distraction and excessive workload.

Competing Operational Priorities: Operational needs, often urgent, require personnel to prioritize speed of information sharing over data security. Meanwhile, facilities must comply with large-scale data portability regulations that require them to make health records and other sensitive information available in digital and sharable formats. These processes can increase the risks of data breaches if providers don’t have the proper security measures in place.

Budgetary Constraints: Healthcare organizations have limited IT budgets, and their tech teams are often stretched thin. They spend most resources on acquiring and implementing new technology solutions to stay current and competitive, leaving few to secure and maintain their networks. Many organizations don’t have in-house security teams and often outsource the function without assigning any internal stakeholders to coordinate the activities or monitor the outcomes.

Inconsistent Cyber Hygiene: Many healthcare facilities are stuck with legacy systems that are no longer supported by the vendor and can’t be upgraded with the latest security features. As such, they introduce permanent vulnerabilities into the organizations’ networks. Additionally, integrating new and old technology solutions may create interoperability dependencies, network segmentation risks, and blind spots hackers can exploit.

The Pandemic Caused New Issues in Healthcare Cybersecurity

The healthcare industry played a front-and-center role during the COVID-19 pandemic, which necessitated the rapid adoption of digital technologies. While the accelerated digital transformation brought many benefits, it also created various cybersecurity concerns.

An Abrupt Shift to Remote Working: Many non-frontline functions moved to a remote working environment in response to lockdowns. Healthcare organizations lack the time and resources to provide adequate security training to remote workers, implement endpoint protection capabilities, and develop remote system backup and recovery plans to build business resiliency and protect themselves from the consequences of ransomware attacks and data loss.

Rapid Procurement and Implementation of Security Tools: The rapid transition to cloud-based platforms for the new hybrid work environment increased the likelihood of misconfigured security settings and mismanaged security tool deployments. Many organizations also lack plans to maintain and sustain the new platforms and technologies, leading to oversight and creating opportunities for threat actors to strike.

Duration and Scope of the Global Crisis: The pandemic created long-term uncertainty. It increases the stress on individuals and society, which, in turn, raises the population’s susceptibility to social engineering. Meanwhile, the need for coordinated responses from facilities across the nation and authorities around the world requires unconventional partnerships and data-sharing practices that caused chain reactions, increased risk factors, and exposed vulnerabilities.

Navigating the Cybersecurity Nightmare in Healthcare: Today’s complex cybersecurity landscape isn’t easy to navigate, especially in the high-stakes healthcare sector. The rise of remote work and telemedicine, plus the proliferation of connected medical devices, has increased the attack surface dramatically. Budget constraints, competing priorities, and lack of employee training leave a lot of opportunities for hackers to exploit. Also, healthcare providers must comply with increasingly stringent data privacy laws to avoid fines and lawsuits.

A Multi-Layer Approach to Cybersecurity: You need a multi-prong approach to address various challenges. The process starts with gaining visibility across all your network environments to understand who has access to what information. Then, prioritize vulnerabilities and resolve gaps in your scan coverage.

Don’t forget to address all your cloud platforms, especially if you have a hybrid environment that combines cloud applications with legacy software where the connections can become weak links and blind spots. Moreover, you must stay current with all relevant data privacy laws, adhere to the latest security configuration standards, and ensure that your vendors and partners are also compliant to protect your data from supply chain attacks.

RedSeal can help you build a solid foundation by creating in-depth visualizations of your security infrastructure. We then use the insights to prioritize your vulnerabilities and automate your compliance process. Get in touch to see how we can help you assess, remediate, and mitigate your security processes and infrastructure.

How Secure Is Your Pharma Research Data?

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The use of big data and advanced analytics is now essential for innovation across the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. However, working with vast amounts of data — experimental data, clinical trial data, patient data — has become a double-edged sword as organizations face immense challenges in protecting data integrity and ensuring data security in today’s digital environment.

Meanwhile, the global pharmaceutical market will grow above $2 billion by 2028 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.7% between 2022 and 2028. With revenue depending on research and innovation and more of the processes going digital, pharma research data has become a prime target for threat actors who use various means to breach companies’ systems and steal their sensitive information.

Let’s review key data security issues that pharma research companies face and how to protect your sensitive information to help you navigate the complex cybersecurity environment.

Is Pharma Research Data Secure?

Unfortunately, no. The pharmaceutical industry has seen many data breaches in recent years.

In an analysis of 20 pharma companies, five had experienced over 200,000 data exposures and breaches. Some had as many as 400,000 exposures. Another study revealed that over 50% of hospitals, biotech firms, and pharmaceutical companies have more than 1,000 sensitive files accessible to all employees. 33% of these organizations have over 10,000 files exposed to every staff member.

IBM’s Cost of Data Breach 2022 report found that data breaches cost the pharma industry an average of $5.01 million between March 2021 and March 2022. Additionally, the high data regulation environment means these companies see costs accrue years following a breach due to regulatory and legal fees, further impacting an organization’s financial health.

Data breaches in the pharma industry can also lead to direr consequences than in many other sectors. For example, leaked intellectual properties and clinical trial data can lead to reputational damage and lost revenue that could take years to remedy.

Top Pharma Research Data Security Issues

Here are the key cybersecurity challenges faced by pharma companies:

Supply Chain Attacks: Pharma research requires collaboration among various parties, such as research institutions, suppliers, contractors, and partners. The complex ecosystem creates a large attack surface threat actors can exploit. For example, they can infiltrate your network via a vendor with a less secure system. Without complete visibility into their environment, many organizations are left in the dark until it’s too late.

Ransomware Attacks: Due to the need to access critical information in their research, pharma companies are prime targets for ransomware attacks. Especially in companies with lax access controls, hackers can infect just one employee’s device with malware to infiltrate the entire network and lock down access to data for the whole company.

Phishing Scams: Threat actors can use social engineering techniques to trick employees, partners, and researchers into giving up their credentials to access the company’s network and exfiltrate data. Again, an organization without proper access control makes it much easier for hackers to move laterally across its systems.

Emerging Technologies: New platforms, cloud technologies, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices are invaluable in accelerating research and development processes. But they also present inherent cybersecurity risks because of the expansive environment and numerous endpoints. If companies spread their data on multiple platforms without mapping their inventory, they could leave sensitive data out in the open.

Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A): The pharmaceutical industry saw 182 M&A deals in Q2 2022. When two companies merge, their IT infrastructures must work seamlessly with each other, including their cybersecurity protocols and monitoring systems. Mapping all the data to maintain visibility and assessing vulnerabilities can be challenging, leaving the new entity at a higher risk of compromise.

How to Protect Pharma Research Data:

Here are some steps pharma companies can take to protect their research data:

  1. Visualize Access Across Your Network Environment: You can’t protect what you can’t see. You must map your environment and all digital assets to connect the dots, identify blind spots, reveal inconsistencies, and interpret access control. You can then prioritize vulnerabilities based on access and eliminate gaps in your scanner coverage.
  2. Deploy End-to-End Encryption for Data Sharing: Use a robust encryption solution to support data sharing within the organization and with third parties. This way, authorized personnel can use sensitive information without risking exposure. Choose a scalable, database-agnostic encryption technology that can be deployed in the cloud or on-premises to help protect data at rest, in transit, and in use.
  3. Enforce a Zero-Trust Policy and Least-Privilege Access: Least-privilege access is a vital component of a zero-trust framework that continuously authenticates a user’s identity to allow access to protected information. Access control is granted based on the principle that end users should see no more than the data they need to do their job. This approach can help minimize damage even if an employee’s account is compromised and limit a hacker’s lateral movement within your network.
  4. Implement a Comprehensive Incident Response Plan: It’s not a matter of if but when your infrastructure will come under attack, and a well-designed incident response plan is key to containing the damage and minimizing loss. Having an up-to-date model of your network can help accelerate incident response by locating the compromised device and determining which digital assets hackers can reach from the entry point.

Protect Pharma Research Data with a Bird’s-Eye View of Your Network

The first step in strengthening your defense is to know where all your data is and who can access the information. The insights can help you identify vulnerabilities, take remediation actions, and implement continuous compliance monitoring. But mapping all the moving parts, including every connection to the internet, is easier said than done.

RedSeal Stratus gives you an in-depth visualization of the topography and hierarchy of your security infrastructure. It helps you identify critical assets inadvertently exposed to the internet and shows your multi-cloud inventory and connectivity, so you can quickly detect changes in the environment.

Get in touch to see how we can help you proactively improve your security posture and protect your pharma research data.

Tales from the Trenches: Vol 5 — Octet Dyslexia

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Since 2004, RedSeal has helped our customers See and Secure their entire complex network. And while those customers may have understood the value of understanding their environment, how it was connected and see what’s at risk, there is often an “Aha” moment when the true significance is clear. The stories of these moments are lore within the walls of RedSeal. But these tales so clearly illustrate the value of RedSeal beyond just theory that we think they’re worth sharing. In the words of our team in the field, the ones working directly with our customers, this blog series will share the moments where it all gets real.

In this edition of the series, Bill Burge, RedSeal Professional Services exposes inconsistencies in policy definitions with RedSeal.

Octet Dyslexia

Numbers are a tricky business and more numbers equals more tricky, and sometimes our brains see what they want to see and not what is actually there.

While working on PCI audit prep using RedSeal Zones & Policies with a large manufacturer/distributor/retailer we were going over what Internet access existed from the Internet into their cardholder environment.

The customer had two external address blocks and some were allowed access through this path.

I’ll make up the address blocks, as 12.53.22.0 and 15.43.22.0.  In the table of access results was a block of inbound address that was 12.43.22.0 (or something like that).

I asked the customer about this external address block and they said “yeah, we have two external blocks”.  We did a few laps around this like the old “Who’s on first?” routine.

It wasn’t until I put a sample from this range along with samples from their two ranges that they were finally about to SEE that it was an amalgamation of their two ranges, just enough to fool the hurried mind.

A quick Whois determined that the range belonged to a Chinese university, IN CHINA.

We were able to use other features of RedSeal to determine all the device configurations that referenced this block and submit change requests to get them remediated.

Interested in how RedSeal can help your team? Click here to set up a demo or an introductory call.