Agencies alert health care sector to commonly exploited cyber vulnerabilities

The National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and FBI yesterday urged U.S. critical infrastructure and other organizations to take certain actions to protect their systems from known vulnerabilities that China state-sponsored actors continue to exploit to target intellectual property and sensitive networks. In a separate presentation, the Department of Health and Human Services yesterday warned health care organizations that threat actors are increasingly using legitimate network security tools for malicious purposes.

“As we have seen from previous government warnings and previous cyberattacks, hackers associated with the Chinese government continue to target health care in the United States,” said John Riggi, AHA’s national advisor for cybersecurity and risk. “These cyber-espionage campaigns aimed at health care often target sensitive medical research, including research on infectious diseases, genomics and medical technology, thereby making academic medical centers a high priority target for these Chinese government hackers. The HHS bulletin advises that hackers targeting health care often use legitimate open-source penetration testing and hacker simulation tools against us. They use these tools to penetrate our networks and expand their presence within the network. Health care organizations are reminded to fully secure and monitor access and activity of these tools to prevent hackers from ‘living off the land’ in our networks.” 

For more information on these or other cyber and risk issues, contact Riggi at jriggi@aha.org.