Security and HIPAA Compliance for Medical Organizations

The medical industry as it pertains to security and compliance issues consists of caregiver organizations and those who collect, store, or protect patient or medical data (Electronic Protected Health Information, or ePHI). Often synonymous with healthcare, ‘medical’ means hospitals, medical researchers, clinics, doctor offices/physician practices, dental practices, and hosting companies that serve healthcare and non-healthcare markets to keep medical information private.

While medical information is most often stolen for purposes of fraudulent use and for theft, it is also a huge target for ransomware gangs, who seek to extract value from the ability to access this data. Therefore, caregivers and the firms involved in the processing of ePHI need to protect the data and the associated systems against data breach and ransomware. Once a compromise has occurred, a medical data thief can escalate privileges and move laterally, further compromising the caregiver or service provider. Cybersecurity capabilities, expertise, and defense-in-depth data security enforcement are needed to prevent these attacks and damages.

Atomicorp for HIPAA Compliance

Regulatory compliance mandates like HIPAA pose additional damages through fines and penalties if certain questions are not answered. A crucial HIPAA compliance question, protecting data outside the more controllable physical world, is:

“Does your practice have audit control mechanisms that can monitor, record and/or examine information system activity?”

If you don’t, you are far less likely to halt an attack, because you will not have seen or been alerted to the warning signs.

Atomicorp offers the audit control functionality you need to address this HIPAA question with confidence. It provides strong audit control mechanisms through automatic logging, advanced security control rules on data use, and compliance reporting and analysis tools. This functionality addresses §164.312(b), the section of the HIPAA Security Rule that governs auditing and monitoring.

Atomic OSSEC FIM for Compliance: PCI-DSS, NIST, FISMA

Doctors’ offices, medical researchers, clinics, hospitals, and also network and security providers need to keep data secure and private and in compliance with more than just HIPAA.

Another big business compliance challenge is PCI-DSS. The majority of medical facilities accept credit cards and use credit card payment systems, so they want to be secure enough to be PCI-DSS compliant (PCI-DSS is the governing body of credit card law in the U.S. and around the world). If you’re not compliant, you pay fines, lose privileges, and are prohibited from receiving or processing credit card information.

Atomicorp provides strong file integrity monitoring (FIM) and Center for Internet Security (CIS) foundational capabilities ideal for compliance in general. FIM validates the integrity of operating system and application software by verifying a current file’s state against an established baseline. It protects your data and data systems. PCI-DSS, NIST, and JSIG frameworks and regulations require file integrity monitoring explicitly via prescriptively defined requirements; HIPAA, GDPR, and others call for FIM as part of their performance requirements.

Don’t let private patient data fall off your radar and fall into the wrong hands. Use Atomicorp automatic detection and active response measures across environments such as data centers, servers, VMs, and containers to ward off attacks and HIPAA violations as well as address other compliance challenges in the organization.

Visit the Atomic OSSEC page.

See about our ModSecurity and WAF for web application security.

Read the FIM whitepaper to discover how you can use Atomic OSSEC to:

• Inspect more than just files, and scan for system vulnerabilities.
• Support major cloud platform providers (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others).
• Comply with standards and regulations such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA, Hitrust, NIST 800-53, NERC CIP, CIS, GDPR.
• And more.