HHS alerts health sector to 14 new cyber vulnerabilities 

The health care sector should swiftly implement patches or mitigations to address 14 new cyber vulnerabilities identified by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in May, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center (HC3) advised this week. The vulnerabilities affect Baxter Welch Allyn, Microsoft, Google/Android, Apple, Mozilla, Cisco, SAP, Adobe, Fortinet and Atlassian. HC3 also released an advisory recommending an update to systems following the disclosure of a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP). Mitigation efforts have also been advised for Snowflake users after the platform recently detected increases in cyber threats targeting certain customer accounts, according to HC3. 

"The ongoing parade of significant vulnerabilities in third-party party technology impacting health care providers is clear evidence that the primary source of cyber risk that hospitals and health systems face is externally derived not internal," said John Riggi, AHA national advisor for cybersecurity and risk. "Technology and software developers must follow the principles of ‘secure by design and secure by default’ and to truly secure the health care field, it is incumbent upon third-party providers to also implement the voluntary health care cybersecurity performance goals." 

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.