HHS alerts health sector to 21 new cyber vulnerabilities

The health care sector should quickly implement patches or mitigations to address 21 new cyber vulnerabilities identified by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in January, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center (HC3) advised this week. The vulnerabilities affect Ivanti, Microsoft, Google/Android, Apple, Mozilla, Cisco, SAP, VMWare, Adobe, Fortinet, Atlassian, and Jenkins products and include critical vulnerabilities that cyber criminals are actively exploiting.

“These important monthly updates from HC3 remind us that vulnerabilities in third-party technologies expose hospitals to significant cyber risk, reinforcing the need for software developers to do better when it comes to secure software design,” said John Riggi, AHA’s national advisor for cybersecurity and risk. “Foreign-based hackers also see these published vulnerabilities and their strategy is simple and effective — ‘hack before we patch.’ It is recommended that hospital and health systems follow the HHS voluntary cybersecurity performance goals and maintain effective risk-based vulnerability management and third-party risk management programs.” 

For more information on this or other cyber and risk issues, contact Riggi at jriggi@aha.org. For the latest cyber and risk resources and threat intelligence, visit aha.org/cybersecurity.