March 2020
The Wall Street Journal
As doctors and nurses battle the coronavirus pandemic in U.S. hospitals, medical providers’ information-technology employees also have their hands full: Much of the support staff is working remotely, making it more difficult to keep them safe online.
Putting technology in place for remote work and security has required enormous effort and can strain technology functions within health-care systems, said Leonard Rollins, chief information officer for the Joplin, Mo.-based Freeman Health System…
In addition, security staff will have a tough time ensuring that employee systems are adequately protected, said Eric Friedberg, co-president of insurance broker Aon PLC’s Stroz Friedberg cyber risk business. They won’t have the same visibility into personal machines as they would into company devices on a corporate network, he said, and they can’t necessarily enforce a hospital’s cybersecurity policies in the same way.
The pandemic adds another wrinkle to cybersecurity operations, Mr. Friedberg said: If an attack is successful, restrictions on physically accessing offices mean that incident response procedures could be hobbled, making recovery slower. He suggested that organizations should focus on defending against attacks that could halt services, such as ransomware, rather than spreading efforts too thinly across all areas.
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