Healthcare Cybersecurity

NCSC Password Recommendations

Posted by HIPAA Journal

The UK’s NCSC password recommendations have been updated and a new strategy is being promoted that meets password strength requirements but improves usability. 

There are multiple schools of thought when it comes to the creation of passwords, but all are based on the premise that passwords need to be sufficiently complex to ensure they cannot be easily guessed, not only by humans, but also the algorithms used by hackers in their brute force attacks.

Each year lists of the worst passwords are published that are compiled from credentials exposed in data breaches. These worst password lists clearly demonstrate that some people are very poor at choosing passwords. Passwords such as “password,” “12345678,” and “qwertyuiop” all feature highly in the lists. Due to the risk of end users creating these weak passwords, many organizations now have minimum requirements for password complexity, but that does not always mean that strong passwords will be set.

The Problem with Password Complexity Requirements

The minimum requirements for password complexity are typically to have at least one lower- and upper-case letter, a number, and often a special character. Incorporating these elements makes passwords much harder to guess – in theory at least. In practice, individuals get around these requirements by setting passwords such as “Passw0rd!” or “Qwertyuiop1!” that meet complexity requirements but are still incredibly weak and extremely vulnerable to brute force attacks.

From a security perspective, all accounts should have a unique password which must never be used to protect multiple accounts. Passwords should ideally consist of random letters, numbers, and characters and be sufficiently long – 8 characters as an absolute minimum. The problem is that while these random complex passwords are strong and will be resistant to brute force attacks, they are also virtually impossible for most people to remember, especially considering the average person has around one hundred passwords.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) highlighted this problem in its latest password guidance (SP 800-63B), and recommends the use of passphrases rather than passwords, as the length of a passphrase of, say 16 characters, adds the required complexity while being human-friendly.

Now, the National Cyber Security Center (NSCS), part of the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has suggested a new approach for creating passwords that combines security with usability.

NCSC Password Recommendations are to Use Three Random Words

The solution proposed by NSCS is contrary to the arbitrary complexity password requirements that are often recommended. Complex passwords consisting of lower- and upper-case letters, numbers, and special characters are often far from complex may give a false sense of security. The reason is the character combinations selected by end users are usually far from random. There are tricks that many people use to make passwords easy to remember and meet password complexity requirements, and those tricks are known to hackers. For example, replacing a 1 with an exclamation mark, an E with a 3, a 5 with an S, or an O with a zero.

There are also combinations of letters and numbers that are more common than others, and those more common combinations are incorporated into hackers’ password guessing tools. “Counterintuitively, the enforcement of these complexity requirements results in the creation of more predictable passwords,” explained NSCS in a recent blog post. “Security that’s not usable doesn’t work.”

The NCSC password recommendations add enough complexity while still making passwords easy to remember. They are to use three random words to make up a password. The use of three random words means passwords will be relatively long, sufficiently complex, but easy to remember.

The three random word approach to passwords works in several different ways:

  • Length – Passwords will generally be longer
  • Impact – The strategy is quick and easy to explain
  • Novelty – Encourages use of words not previously considered
  • Usability – It is easy to think of three words and remember them

“Traditional password advice telling us to remember multiple complex passwords is simply daft,” said NCSC’s technical director, Dr Ian Levy. “By following this advice, people will be much less vulnerable to cybercriminals and I’d encourage people to think about the passwords they use on their important accounts, and consider a password manager.”

The latter advice is important, as the strategy of using three random words does not work when unique passwords need to be created for 100 difficult online accounts. “Adopting three random words is not a panacea that solves the issue of remembering a lot of passwords in a single stroke, and we expect it to be used alongside secure storage,” said NCSC.

The aim of the latest NCSC password recommendations is not to solve the password problem completely, but simply to increase password diversity – that is, “reducing the number of passwords that are discoverable by cheap and efficient search algorithms, forcing an attacker to run multiple search algorithms (or use inefficient algorithms) to recover a useful number of passwords.”

The Best Password Strategy

The best password strategy based on the NCSC password recommendations is to create password of three random words, but also to use a password manager. A password manager allows users to generate truly random strings of numbers, letters, and characters that are incredibly complex, but importantly users never have to remember them. Those passwords are stored in encrypted form in a secure password vault and will be autofilled when a user needs them. There is never the need to remember them or type them in. These solutions are very secure, and many operate under the zero-knowledge model, where even the password manager developer does not have access to users’ password vaults.

All that is required is for a user to set a secure, master password for their password vault and set up 2-factor authentication. The strategy of using three random words would work well for the master password that provides access to user’ vault of truly random, long complex passwords.

Password manager solutions are usually low cost or even free. For example, Bitwarden provides a secure, open-source password manager solution under a free tier with the individual premium package only costing $10 per year, yet even with the low cost of these solutions, uptake is still low.

If businesses and individuals make the change and start using a password manager and implement the latest NCSC password recommendations, password security and usability will be substantially improved.

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73% of Businesses Suffered a Data Breach Linked to a Phishing Attack in the Past 12 Months

Posted by HIPAA Journal

Ransomware attacks have increased significantly during the past year, but phishing attacks continue to cause problems for businesses, according to a recent survey conducted by Arlington Research on behalf of security firm Egress. Almost three quarters (73%) of surveyed businesses said they had experienced a phishing related data breach in the past 12 months.

The survey for the 2021 Insider Data Breach Report was conducted on 500 IT leaders and 3,000 employees in the United States and United Kingdom. The survey revealed 74% of organizations had experienced a data breach as a result of employees breaking the rules, something that has not been helped by the pandemic when many employees have been working remotely. More than half (53%) of IT leaders said remote work had increased risk, with 53% reporting an increase in phishing incidents in the past year.

The increased risk from remote working is of concern, especially as many organizations plan to continue to support remote working or adopt a hybrid working model in the future. 50% of IT leaders believe remote/hybrid working will make it harder to prevent data breaches from malicious email attacks. There appears to be a disconnect, as only 61% of employees believe they are less likely or equally likely to cause a data breach when working from home.

Phishing attacks are naturally bad for organizations but there is also a human cost. In 23% of organizations, employees who fell for a phishing email that resulted in a data breach were either fired or voluntarily left after the incident.

“Organizations are being bombarded by sophisticated phishing attacks. Hackers are crafting highly targeted campaigns that use clever social engineering tricks to gain access to organizations’ most sensitive data, as well as leapfrog into their supply chain. Phishing is also the most common entry point for ransomware, with potentially devastating consequences,” said Egress VP of Threat Intelligence Jack Chapman. “Remote working has also made employees even more vulnerable. With many organizations planning for a remote or hybrid future, phishing is a risk that must remain central to any security team’s plans for securing their workforce.”

The survey revealed an astonishing 94% of businesses had experienced an insider data breach in the past year. 84% of IT leaders said human error was the leading cause of insider breaches, although 28% said malicious insider breaches were their biggest fear.

89% of insider incidents had repercussions for the employees in question; however, an overwhelming majority (97%) of employees said they would report a breach they had caused, which is reassuring considering 55% of IT leaders said they rely on employees to alert them to security incidents.

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Healthcare Industry has Highest Number of Reported Data Breaches in 2021

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Data breaches declined by 24% globally in the first 6 months of 2021, although breaches in the United States increased by 1.5% in that period according to the 2021 Mid-Year Data Breach QuickView Report from Risk-Based Security.

Risk Based Security identified 1,767 publicly reported breaches between January 1, 2021 and June 30, 2021. Across those breaches, 18.8 billion records were exposed, which represents a 32% decline from the first 6 months of 2020 when 27.8 billion records were exposed. 85% of the exposed records in the first half of 2021 occurred in just one breach at the Forex trading service FBS Markets.

The report confirms the healthcare industry continues to be targeted by cyber threat actors, with the industry having reported more data breaches than any other industry sector this year. Healthcare has been the most targeted industry or has been close to the top since at least 2017 and it does not appear that trend will be reversed any time soon. 238 healthcare data breaches were reported in the first 6 months of 2021, with finance & insurance the next most attacked sector with 194 reported incidents, followed by information with 180 data breaches.

The report shows there have been significant shifts in data breach trends in 2021. While data breaches have declined globally and have remained fairly constant in the United States, there has been a marked increase in ransomware attacks. Risk Based Security recorded 352 ransomware attacks in the first 6 months of 2021 and, if that pace continues, the number of attacks will be significantly higher than 2020.

Ransomware attacks are extremely costly in healthcare due to the long period of downtime, and without access to medical records patient safety is put at risk. This is of course known to ransomware gangs. The reliance on access to data and the high cost of downtime increases the probability of the ransom being paid.

In 2020, data breaches started to take longer to be reported and that trend has continued in 2021. This is in part due to the increase in ransomware attacks, which can take longer to investigate, but even taking that into account there were many cases when breach notifications took an unusually long time to be issued and that has started to attract attention from regulators.

“Ransomware attacks continue at an alarming pace, inflicting serious damage on the victim organizations that rely on their services,” said Inga Goddijn, Executive Vice President at Risk Based Security. “The slow pace of reporting brought on by lengthy incident investigations has not improved and attackers continue to find new opportunities to take advantage of changing circumstances.”

The majority of reported breaches (67.97%) were hacking incidents, with only 100 (5.66%) due to viruses, and just 45 email incidents (2.55%). There were 76 web breaches reported (4.30%); however, they resulted in the highest number of records being breached.

Data breaches that exposed access credentials such as email addresses and passwords have remained consistent with other years, with email addresses exposed in 40% of breaches and passwords in 33%. The majority of reported breaches in 2021 were the result of external threat actors (78.66%), with 13.75% caused by insiders. Out of the confirmed insider breaches, the majority were accidental (58.85%), with 18.52% caused by malicious insiders.

Risk Based Security also notes that breach severity is increasing. Large numbers of data breaches have been reported in 2021 that involved sensitive data, which is a particularly worrying trend.

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NSA & CISA Issue Guidance on Hardening Security and Managing Kubernetes Environments

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Kubernetes is a popular open-source cloud solution for deploying and managing containerized apps.  Recently there have been several security breaches where hackers have gained access to poorly secured Kubernetes environments to steal sensitive data, deploy cryptocurrency miners, and conduct denial-of-service attacks.

This month, security researchers discovered Kubernetes clusters were being targeted by cyber actors who were exploiting misconfigured permissions for the web-facing dashboard of Argo Workflows instances. In these attacks, the computing power of Kubernetes environments were harnessed for mining cryptocurrencies. In another attack, a vulnerability in the Kubernetes API Server was being exploited to steal sensitive data.

In light of these attacks, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have issued a 52-page technical report that includes detailed guidance on how to correctly set up and manage Kubernetes environments to make it harder for the environments to be compromised by hackers.

The report includes details of the most common threats to Kubernetes environments, including supply chain attacks, malicious external cyber actors, and insider threats. Improving defenses against supply chain attacks can be a major challenge. These can arise in the container build cycle or infrastructure acquisition. Vulnerabilities and misconfigurations of the Kubernetes architecture such as the control plane, worker nodes, and containerized applications are often exploited, while insiders with high-level privileges can easily abuse their privileges to conduct a range of attacks.

There are multiple ways that hackers gain access to Kubernetes environments, and while it is not possible to eliminate risk entirely, by setting up Kubernetes correctly, avoiding common misconfigurations and implementing mitigations, security can be significantly strengthened. Implementing appropriate access controls and limiting privileges can greatly reduce the risk from insider threats.

The most common way for hackers to gain access to Kubernetes is by exploiting vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. It is therefore important for security teams to conduct scans of their Kubernetes containers and pods to identify vulnerabilities and misconfigurations and ensure they are corrected, or mitigations are implemented. Periodic reviews of Kubernetes settings and regular vulnerability scans should be performed.

The NSA and CISA also recommend running containers and pods with the least privileges possible, and using network separation, firewalls, strong authentication, and log auditing. It is also important to keep on top of patching, updates, and upgrades to ensure the Kubernetes environment remains secure.

The guidance includes detailed recommendations on Kubernetes pod security, network separation and hardening, authentication and authorization, log auditing, and details best practices for application security.

The Kubernetes Hardening Guidance can be downloaded on this link (PDF).

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Multiple Critical Vulnerabilities Identified in Pneumatics System Used in 2,300 U.S. Hospitals

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Nine critical vulnerabilities have been identified in the Nexus Control Panel of Swisslog Healthcare Translogic Pneumatic Tube System (PTS) stations, which are used in more than 80% of major hospitals in the United States. Pneumatic tube systems are used to rapidly send test samples and medications around hospitals and the vulnerable PTS stations are present in 3,000 hospitals worldwide, including 2,300 in the United States.

The vulnerabilities, collectively named ‘PwnedPiper’, were discovered by researchers at Armis Security. In total, 9 critical flaws were identified in the Nexus Control Panel and the firmware of all current models of Translogic PTS stations are affected.

The vulnerabilities identified by the researchers are common in Internet of Things (IoT) devices but are far more serious in pneumatic tube systems, which are part of hospitals’ critical infrastructure. The Armis researchers pointed out that these systems are prevalent in hospitals, yet they have never been thoroughly analyzed or researched.

The flaws could be exploited by a threat actor to cause denial of service, harvest sensitive data such RFID credentials of employees, and to perform reconnaissance to identify the functions or location of the stations and gain an understanding of the physical layout of the PTS network. The vulnerabilities could also be exploited in a ransomware attack.

The flaws include the use of hard-coded passwords, memory corruption vulnerabilities, privilege escalation flaws, unencrypted connections, unauthenticated firmware updates, and remote code execution vulnerabilities. If exploited, an attacker could gain full control of all Nexus stations in a hospital.

“This research sheds light on systems that are hidden in plain sight but are nevertheless a crucial building block to modern-day healthcare,” said Nadir Izrael, Armis co-founder and CTO. “Understanding that patient care depends not only on medical devices, but also on the operational infrastructure of a hospital is an important milestone to securing healthcare environments.”

The researchers detailed a scenario in which the flaws could be exploited to deliver ransomware. First an attacker would need a foothold in the hospital network. This could be as simple as exploiting a vulnerability in a low-grade IoT device such as a hospital IP camera. Once network access is gained, the Translogic PTS could be targeted since it is connected to hospital networks. Any of 5 vulnerabilities could then be exploited to achieve remote code execution in an attack that could see all Nexus stations compromised, either using ransomware or simply shutting down stations.

“In this volatile state, the hospital’s operations can be severely derailed,” said the researchers. “Medications supplied to departments, timely delivery of lab samples, and even blood units supplied to operating rooms all depending on constant availability of the PTS.”

Armis presented the findings at Black Hat USA. Swisslog Healthcare has patched 8 of the 9 vulnerabilities in Nexus Control Panel version 7.2.5.7, with the one remaining vulnerability due to be fixed in an upcoming release. The remaining vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2021-37160, affects legacy systems and is due to the lack of firmware validation during a file upload for a firmware update.

There have been no known cases of the vulnerabilities being exploited. Swisslog Healthcare has suggested mitigations and workarounds in its security advisory for hospitals that are unable to upgrade to the latest version of the Nexus Control Panel.

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CISA Publishes List of the Most Commonly Exploited Vulnerabilities

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The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) have issued a joint cybersecurity advisory about the most common vulnerabilities exploited by cyber actors in 2020, many of which are still being widely exploited in 2021.

The advisory lists the top 30 exploited Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), how each vulnerability is exploited, recommended mitigations, indicators of compromise, and tools and methods that can be used to check whether the vulnerabilities have already been exploited.

Recently disclosed vulnerabilities are exploited by cyber threat actors, but most of the commonly exploited vulnerabilities are not new and were disclosed in the past two years. In 2020, the pandemic forced many businesses to switch from an office-based to a remote workforce, so it is not surprising that 4 of the most commonly exploited vulnerabilities in 2020 concern remote working solutions such as VPNs and cloud-based technologies. Since these remote working solutions are constantly in use, many businesses failed to apply patches and the vulnerabilities were exploited. It is essential that time is taken to apply patches as soon as possible and for IT teams conduct rigorous patch management.

Patches are available to address all of the most commonly exploited vulnerabilities included in the security advisory. Patching should be prioritized, starting with the vulnerabilities that are known to be currently exploited or those that are available to the largest number of potential cyber actors – for example, vulnerabilities in Internet facing systems. If it is not possible to apply patches, consider implementing temporary workarounds and other mitigations suggested by vendors.

The top 12 exploited vulnerabilities in 2020 are detailed in the table below

Vendor CVE Type
Citrix CVE-2019-19781 arbitrary code execution
Pulse CVE 2019-11510 arbitrary file reading
Fortinet CVE 2018-13379 path traversal
F5- Big IP CVE 2020-5902 remote code execution (RCE)
MobileIron CVE 2020-15505 RCE
Microsoft CVE-2017-11882 RCE
Atlassian CVE-2019-11580 RCE
Drupal CVE-2018-7600 RCE
Telerik CVE 2019-18935 RCE
Microsoft CVE-2019-0604 RCE
Microsoft CVE-2020-0787 elevation of privilege
Netlogon CVE-2020-1472 elevation of privilege

In 2021, cyber actors continued to target vulnerabilities in perimeter-type devices, with the most commonly exploited flaws in Pulse, Accellion, VMware, Fortinet, and Microsoft Exchange. CISA is urging security teams to prioritize patching for the following vulnerabilities, which have been extensively exploited in 2021 in addition to addressing the above vulnerabilities.

Vendor CVE
Microsoft Exchange  CVE-2021-26855, CVE-2021-26857, CVE-2021-26858, and CVE-2021-27065
Pulse Secure  CVE-2021-22893, CVE-2021-22894, CVE-2021-22899, and CVE-2021-22900
Accellion CVE-2021-27101, CVE-2021-27102, CVE-2021-27103, CVE-2021-27104
VMware CVE-2021-21985
Fortinet CVE-2018-13379, CVE-2020-12812, and CVE-2019-5591

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The Average Cost of a Healthcare Data Breach is Now $9.42 Million

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IBM Security has published its 2021 Cost of a Data Breach Report, which shows data breach costs have risen once again and are now at the highest level since IBM started publishing the reports 17 years ago. There was a 10% year-over-year increase in data breach costs, with the average cost rising to $4.24 million per incident. Healthcare data breaches are the costliest, with the average cost increasing by $2 million to $9.42 million per incident. Ransomware attacks cost an average of $4.62 million per incident.

Source: IBM Security

The large year-over-year increase in data breach costs has been attributed to the drastic operational shifts due to the pandemic. With employees forced to work remotely during the pandemic, organizations had to rapidly adapt their technology. The pandemic forced 60% of organizations to move further into the cloud. Such a rapid change resulted in vulnerabilities being introduced and security often lagged behind the rapid IT changes. Remote working also hindered organizations’ ability to quickly respond to security incidents and data breaches.

According to IBM, data breaches costs were more than $1 million higher when remote work was indicated as a factor in the data breach. When remote work was a factor, the average data breach cost was $4.96 million compared to $3.89 million when remote work was not a factor. Almost 20% of organizations that reported data breaches in 2020 cited remote work as a factor, with the cost of a data breach around 15% higher when remote work was a factor.

To compile the report, IBM conducted an in-depth analysis of data breaches involving fewer than 100,000 records at 500 organizations between May 2020 and March 2021, with the survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute.

The most common root cause of data breaches in the past year were compromised credentials, which accounted for 20% of data breaches. These breaches took longer to detect and contain, with an average of 250 days compared to an overall average of 212 days.

The most common types of data exposed in data breaches were customers’ personal data such as names, email addresses, passwords, and healthcare data. 44% of all data breaches included those types of data. A data breach involving email addresses, usernames, and passwords can easily have a spiral effect, as hackers can use the compromised data in further attacks. According to the Ponemon Institute survey, 82% of individuals reuse passwords across multiple accounts.

Breaches involving customers’ personally identifiable information (PII) were more expensive than breaches involving other types of data, with a cost per record of $180 when PII was involved compared to $161 per record for other types of data.

Data breach costs were lower at companies that had implemented encryption, security analytics, and artificial intelligence-based security solutions, with these three mitigating factors resulting in data breach cost savings of between $1.25 million and $1.49 million per data breach.

Adopting a zero-trust approach to security makes it easier for organizations to deal with data breaches. Organizations with a mature zero trust strategy had an average data breach cost of $3.28 million, which was $1.76 million lower than those who had not deployed this approach at all.

“Higher data breach costs are yet another added expense for businesses in the wake of rapid technology shifts during the pandemic,” said Chris McCurdy, Vice President and General Manager, IBM Security. “While data breach costs reached a record high over the past year, the report also showed positive signs about the impact of modern security tactics, such as AI, automation and the adoption of a zero-trust approach – which may pay off in reducing the cost of these incidents further down the line.”

Security automation greatly reduces data breach costs. Organizations with a “fully deployed” security automation strategy had average breach costs of $2.90 million per incident, compared to $6.71 million at organizations that had no security automation.

Companies with an incident response team that had tested their incident response plan had 54.9% lower breach costs than those that had neither. The average data breach cost was $3.25 million compared to $5.71 million when neither were in place.

The cost of a data breach was $750,000 (16.6%) higher for companies that had not undergone any digital transformation due to COVID-19. Cloud-based data breach costs were lower for organizations that had adopted a hybrid cloud approach, with an average cost of $3.61 million at organizations with hybrid cloud infrastructure compared to $4.80 million for organizations with a primarily public cloud and $4.55 million for those that had adopted a private cloud approach. Data breach costs were 18.8% higher when a breach was experienced during a cloud migration project.

Organizations that were further into their cloud migration plan were able to detect and respond to data breaches far more quickly – on average 77 days more quickly for organizations that were at a mature state of their cloud modernization plan than those in the early stages.

Mega data breaches – those involving between 50 million and 65 million records – cost an average of $401 million per incident, which is more than 100 times the cost of breaches involving between 1,000 and 100,0000 records.

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Report: The State of Privacy and Security in Healthcare

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2020 was a particularly bad year for the healthcare industry with record numbers of data breaches reported. Ransomware was a major threat, with Emsisoft identifying 560 ransomware attacks on healthcare providers in 2020. Those attacks cost the healthcare industry dearly. $20.8 billion was lost in downtime in 2020, according to Comparitech, which is more than twice the ransomware downtime cost to the healthcare industry in 2019.

With the healthcare industry facing such high numbers of cyberattacks, the risk of a security breach is considerable, yet many healthcare organizations are still not fully conforming with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF) and the HIPAA Security Rule, according to the 2021 Annual State of Healthcare Privacy and Security Report published today by healthcare cybersecurity consulting firm CynergisTek.

To compile the report – The State of Healthcare Privacy and Security – Maturity Paradox: New World, New Threats, New Focus – CynergisTek used annual risk assessments at 100 healthcare organizations and measured progress alongside overall NIST CSF conformance. 75% of healthcare organizations improved overall NIST conformance in 2020; however, 64% of healthcare organizations fell short of the 80% NIST conformance level considered to be the passing grade. Most of the improvements made in 2020 were only small.

As the graph below shows, 53 healthcare organizations improved NIST conformance year over year, 32 of those were considerably below the 80th percentile and 17 healthcare organizations saw NIST conformance decline year-over- year.

Year-over-Year Improvements in NIST CSF Conformance. Source: CynergisTek State of Healthcare Privacy and Security Report.

In order to improve resilience to ransomware and other cyberattacks, it is essential for healthcare organizations to improve their security posture. It will not be possible to stay one step ahead of threat actors if organizations do not take steps to improve NIST CSF and HIPAA Security Rule conformance.

While good conformance scores are a good indication of security posture, they do not necessarily reflect the extent to which healthcare organizations have reduced risk. For this year’s report, CynergisTek placed less emphasis on conformance scores and assessed the measures healthcare organizations had taken to identify which core functions of the NIST CSF appeared to be really driving long term security improvements, with the goal of identifying the best opportunities for both short- and long-term success.

The Identity function provides the foundation on which the rest of the core functions are based, but 73% of healthcare organizations were rated low performers in this function. Asset management and supply chain risk management were two of the key areas that need to be addressed. The healthcare supply chain is a universal issue and the weak link in healthcare. Many healthcare organizations struggle to validate whether or not third-party vendors meet specific security requirements. 76% of healthcare organizations failed to secure their supply chains.

The Protect function requires safeguards to be implemented to protect critical infrastructure and data. One of the main areas where organizations were falling short is protection of data using encryption. “An organization’s default for storing protected data of any kind and transmitting it should include encryption – it clearly does not”, explained CynergisTek. High performers achieved 90% conformance for protection of data at rest, whereas the rest of the sector was in the low 30th percentile.

In the Detect function, there was a major difference between high and low performers, but overall there were good levels of implementation; however, to be considered a high performer it is necessary to get the detect function substantially implemented and to ensure there is significant automation of security monitoring.

The Respond function concerns an organization’s ability to quickly implement appropriate activities when a cybersecurity event is detected, and this is an area where significant improvements need to be made. Only the highest performers are actively investigating notifications from detection systems, and only high performers were consistently and substantially mitigating incidents.

The recover function identifies activities required to return to normal operations after a cybersecurity incident. While there were gaps among the high performers, conformance was generally very good, but significant improvements need to be made by low performers. Around two-thirds (66%) of healthcare organizations are underperforming in recovery planning.

CynergisTek identified several aspects of security that healthcare organizations need to focus on over the coming 12 months:

  • Improve automation of security functions
  • Validate technical controls for people and processes
  • Perform exercises and drills at the enterprise level to test all components of the business
  • Secure the supply chain
  • Look beyond the requirements of the HIPAA Rules and further enhance privacy and security measures

The researchers found notable improvements had been made in organizations’ HIPAA privacy programs in 2020, with some healthcare organizations making exceptional progress. However, there is still room for improvement. CynergisTek identified several privacy areas that should be focused on in 2021.

These measures include implementing user access monitoring tools and engaging in proactive rather than reactive monitoring, addressing defective HIPAA authorizations, preventing violations of the Minimum Necessary Rule by defining criteria to limit PHI disclosure, updating insufficient privacy policies and procedures and ensuring the new policies are implemented, and addressing inappropriate Hybrid Entity designations.

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The Average Ransomware Payment Fell by 38% in Q2, 2021

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The average ransom payment made by victims of ransomware attacks fell by 38% between Q1 and Q2, 2021, according to the latest report from ransomware incident response company Coveware. In Q2, the average ransom payment was $136,576 and the median payment decreased by 40% to $47,008.

Average Ransom Payments by Quarter. Source: Coveware

One of the key factors driving down ransom payments is a lower prevalence of attacks by two key ransomware operations, Ryuk and Clop, both of which are known for their large ransom demands. Rather than the majority of attacks being conducted by a few groups, there is now a growing number of disparate ransomware-as-a-service brands that typically demand lower ransom payments. In Q2, Sodinokibi (REvil) was the most active RaaS operation conducting 16.5% of attacks, followed by Conti V2 (14.4%), Avaddon (5.4%), Mespinoza (4.9%), and Hello Kitty (4.5%). Ryuk only accounted for 3.7% of attacks and Clop 3.3%.

The Sodinokibi gang has now gone silent following the attack on Kaseya and appears to have been shut down; however, the group has shut down operations in the past only to restart with a new ransomware variant. Even if the operators have retired, the affiliates used to conduct the attacks are likely to just switch to an alternative RaaS operation so attack volume may not be affected.

The most common vectors used in attacks has been fluctuating over the past few months. In Q1, 2021 there was an increase in brute force attacks on Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and the exploitation of software vulnerabilities, with phishing attacks falling. In Q2, RDP compromises and software vulnerability exploits both declined and email phishing increased, with phishing and RDP compromises now equally common. The exploitation of software vulnerabilities is the attack vector of choice for targeted attacks on large enterprises, and those attacks tend to be conducted only by the most sophisticated RaaS operations with large operating budgets that allow them to purchase single day exploits or buy access to large networks.

In Q2, more than 75% of ransomware attacks were on businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees. This is because these smaller companies are less likely to invest in security awareness training for the workforce and email security to block phishing attacks. They are also more likely to expose RDP to the Internet. Smaller businesses are also more likely to outsource security to MSPs. MSPs remain a major target, as an attack on an MSP will allow the attacker to then attack all MSP’s clients.

The report indicates a fall in the effectiveness of double extortion tactics. This is where prior to file encryption, sensitive data are exfiltrated. A demand is issued for the key to decrypt data and a second payment is required to prevent the exposure or sale of stolen data. In Q2, 81% of attacks involved data exfiltration prior to file encryption, up from 76% in Q1.

However, payment to ensure data deletion is now much less likely. In 2020, 65% of victims that were able to recover data from backups paid the attackers to prevent the exposure of stolen data, but in Q2, 2021 the percentage was just 50%.

The most attacked industry sectors in Q2 were the public sector (16.2%), professional services (13.3%), and healthcare (10.8%). Coveware suggests that these industries may not be specifically targeted, instead they are simply the easiest to attack. For instance, the number of attacks on law firms increased but that was largely down to the attack by the Clop ransomware group on Accellion File Transfer Appliances, which were disproportionately used by law firms.

Coveware reports that the average downtime from a ransomware attack declined by 15% in Q2, with victims typically having 23 days of downtime following at attack; however, this was attributed to an increase in data only attacks where there was no material business interruption.

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