Enhancing Cybersecurity in Healthcare IT: A Review of 2025 Priorities

Setting effective cybersecurity priorities is crucial to safeguarding patient care and preventing costly attacks. With cyber threats escalating and evolving, staying ahead requires strategic planning. With limited resources, optimizing your cybersecurity budget and maximizing ROI is crucial.

But where do you start? Consider these tips:

Conduct Supply Chain Audits

The supply chain is one of the top exploited avenues in healthcare cybersecurity today. Strengthen supply chain security by auditing internal systems and vendors and addressing gaps uncovered in security assessments.

Create a Holistic IT Security Environment

To maximize cybersecurity ROI, prioritize integration with your existing systems environment and consolidation, enabling rapid service deployment while eliminating redundant technologies and overlapping controls.

Focus on investments in technologies and services that provide a holistic approach to cybersecurity. Adopting a comprehensive end-to-end approach can streamline your cybersecurity landscape, eliminate unnecessary expenses, and enhance efficiency.

Adopt a Managed Services Approach

Leverage external expertise to bolster defenses. Partnering with a managed services provider enables you to access a range of benefits, including advanced security, scalability, and cost efficiency.

By leveraging the specialized knowledge and economies of scale managed service providers offer, healthcare organizations can maintain their focus on patient care and services while ensuring data is protected and IT infrastructure is secure, compliant, and scalable.

What Technologies or Resources Should You Invest In?

SIEM and SOAR

For a proactive ransomware defense, consider investing in two essential technologies: Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) solutions. When paired, these tools provide a powerful synergy.

A well-integrated SIEM and SOAR solution enables swift threat detection and response, automated isolation of compromised devices, and enhanced incident prevention and mitigation. These integrated solutions help to:

Analyze logs and network activity to identify potential threats
Detect common patterns based on known threats
Trigger automated responses to mitigate risks
Enable proactive and reactive measures

Additionally, avoid siloed approaches by integrating SIEM and SOAR with technologies such as antivirus software, firewalls, switches, and other security tools. Ensure a comprehensive view of your security posture by continuously monitoring your environment, conducting regular assessments (e.g., NIST 800-53 audits), and identifying and addressing gaps in your SIEM and SOAR capabilities. Partner with a healthcare-experienced professional to ensure tailored implementation.

The faster your organization can detect threats, the faster the response. Leveraging SIEM and SOAR and ensuring comprehensive integration can enhance overall cybersecurity maturity.

Network Intrusion Detection Systems

Cybersecurity efforts historically prioritized protection. However, the industry is shifting toward an increased focus on detection and response to threats before they disrupt care delivery.

Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) are vital in identifying suspicious activity within a hospital’s infrastructure. NIDS continuously analyze network traffic, flagging anomalies such as:

Unauthorized access attempts to patient records
Lateral movement of threats within the network
Abnormal data transfers indicating potential exfiltration

By leveraging AI-powered threat intelligence, NIDS solutions can detect patterns of cyberattacks in real-time, allowing security teams to neutralize risks before they escalate. Additionally, NIDS can integrate with SIEM and SOAR solutions to enable swift damage control, typically facilitated through software.

Automated response/playbooks are crucial to this effort. This can entail predefined, scripted responses to specific security events, executed through SOAR applications or custom scripting, or they can actually be playbooks that incorporate staff training through simulated drills to develop muscle memory that essentially creates an automated response as the staff learns to understand what steps to take when a particular event happens.

Patient-Centric Incident Response

Traditional IT-focused approaches often overlook the critical impact of cyberattacks on patient well-being. In reality, patient care and safety must take precedence in any attack response. A patient-centric incident response strategy can be achieved by developing a comprehensive plan that prioritizes patient care and safety above all else.

This approach requires establishing a dedicated incident response team trained to respond swiftly and effectively in the event of an incident. Regular tabletop exercises simulate real-world scenarios, ensuring preparedness and reinforcing the organization’s primary role in safeguarding patients when orchestrating a response.

Incident response plans should be reviewed and updated regularly to maintain operational readiness.

Elevated Penetration Testing

Penetration testing (pen testing) must be more than a checkbox item. It’s crucial to revamp pen testing and tabletop exercises to identify vulnerabilities, improve incident response, and spread knowledge within your organization.

Pen testing should involve more than simply hiring a company to see what they can get into from the outside. It should also consider what happens if a malicious actor is already inside and simulate internal threats.

Pen testing methods typically include white box, black box, and gray box testing:

White Box Testing: Testers having knowledge and access to internal systems to identify vulnerabilities from an insider perspective.
Black Box Testing: External testing; testers attempt to break into target systems without inside knowledge of the environment.
Gray Box Testing: A hybrid approach that combines external and internal testing. Testers have partial knowledge of target systems, allowing for a realistic simulation of insider threats or attacks that have breached the network perimeter.

Physical penetration tests, also known as red teaming, are also recommended. These simulate attacks on a physical location to identify security measures and access control vulnerabilities.

Adopt a Cybersecurity-Specific Framework

Organizations seeking to enhance cybersecurity often struggle with where to begin. Cybersecurity-specific frameworks provide guidance, helping navigate implementation.

We recommend that healthcare organizations move beyond the standard HIPAA risk assessment, typically conducted every one to two years, to effectively counter evolving cyber threats. Adversaries continually update their tactics, seeking to exploit vulnerabilities that may be overlooked. Adopting established frameworks can help elevate cybersecurity capabilities to address evolving threats and regulations.

For example, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), Cybersecurity Capability Maturity Model (C2M2), and NIST 800-53 provide structured assessments across various domains, allowing organizations to select and tailor approaches that align with their mission and size. By leveraging these frameworks, healthcare providers can systematically improve their cybersecurity posture, protect sensitive data beyond PHI (e.g., controlled unclassified information or CUI), and improve incident response and preparedness.

How to Implement a Framework

Research cybersecurity frameworks
Assess current cybersecurity maturity (e.g., a C2M2 assessment)
Develop a realistic roadmap for desired maturity
Select a framework aligning with business needs

Take a proactive approach by anticipating evolving state and regulations and develop a roadmap for compliance

Balance implementation with organizational resources
Document and consistently practice security controls
Continuously monitor and update security posture

Invest in Staff Training

Your team is your most valuable asset—make staff training a priority. Educate employees on cybersecurity best practices and incident response. It is imperative to your future cyber health and cyber hygiene.

Take advantage of free education. For example, check out our cybersecurity awareness toolkit for healthcare or join the CloudWave Cybersecurity Insider Program for exclusive access to live quarterly insider sessions, on-demand education, threat intelligence alerts, and more.

Moving Forward

Abandon the status quo. It is not effective at stopping advancing attacks. Our adversaries are learning every single day. By adopting these strategies and following these tips, healthcare IT professionals can optimize their cybersecurity budgets, protect patient care, and stay ahead of emerging threats.

Remember, cybersecurity is an ongoing process that requires continuous monitoring, detection, and response. Stay vigilant and proactive to better protect your organization.