A self service online Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML) traffic management platform that protects Protected Health information (PHI), Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and meets HIPPA compliance by mitigating malicious bots and human fraud before they can infiltrate your ecosystem.
The healthcare industry is increasingly a target for hackers to steal large amounts of patient records for profit. Security incidents and costs associated with security breaches have soared over the past few years. Hospital vulnerabilities are known to be easy targets for hackers to gather large amounts of patient data in a single attack. As healthcare organizations transition to web-based portals and mobile patient care, managing malicious activity becomes an increasingly difficult task.
Healthcare organizations are seeing an rapid increase in cyberattacks
As providers and organizations move their data to the cloud, security risks increase. Hackers target patient Protected Health Information (PHI). Ransomware attacks disrupt providers’ patient care.
Recovering from these breaches is time-consuming, resource draining and costly. Providers experience irreparable damage to their patient’s trust.
Cybersecurity for Small Healthcare Organizations
Smaller organizations don’t typically have the dedicated resources to deal with these new threats and often rely upon 3rd party cloud-based services, which create potential vulnerability access points for hackers.
How Malicious Attacks Work
Hackers will deploy generalized bots, which perform a scan of a website and online infrastructure looking for vulnerabilities they can penetrate. On the surface, these “crawler bots” appear harmless, behaving in a similar manner Googlebots. They simply crawl a site, page by page reviewing its content. This first stage, reconnaissance work, enables cybercriminals to automate their penetration testing in bulk. The resulting vulnerabilities are categorized and targeted through custom bots designed to penetrate the specific vulnerabilities.
Attackers use generalized bots to crawl websites in bulk. They simply load domain names into their crawl scripts. These scripts automatically identify and catalog site vulnerabilities. The bots move on from sites they cannot readily penetrate, those without easily identifiable vulnerabilities. This allows hackers to focus their attention on the easier targets.
Cybercriminals don't initially target specific sites. For healthcare attacks, hackers may have lists of hundreds of thousands or even millions of patient details. They'll target sites with patient portals or payment gateway in an attempt to hijack the portal or gateway to see if which records in their database are valid. Allowing automated bots to access the patient portal or payment gateway URL creates malicious activity opportunity.
Healthcare multicloud reduces an organization’s dependency upon a single cloud provider, providing flexibility, risk mitigation, latency reduction and cost control, but not without threats from malicious activity including…
Multicloud threats include having to secure data in multiple locations, which increases the number of potential attack profile targets, compared with a single cloud infrastructure.
Having to monitor multiple clouds simultaneously can become an overwhelming task for a CISO and IT staff. This could lead to untimely vulnerability patching, exposing vulnerable health data to malicious attack.
Healthcare organizations are under constant threat from malicious activity including…
Most ransomware attacks through 2021 have PHI and PII data as well as hospital systems. But as technology advances, the healthcare system may soon face ransomware attacks on life-saving equipment and technology.
In 2020, 92 separate ransomware attacks affected more than 600 separate healthcare organization and over 18 million patient records. The estimated cost of these attacks was nearly $21 billion.*
* Comparitech analysis.
Bots are used to detect email addresses contained on a site's webpage copy. Next, the bots will attempt to determine the organization's email format by examining the email records. For example: [email protected]. If successful, the bots then gather the names of the organization's employees from the about us, contact us and staff pages. From there it's easy to automatically compile a directory of the organization's employees and their emails. These emails are bulk validated through readily available, inexpensive third-party services before the emails sent. This simple, automated process allows cybercriminals to launch successful phishing attacks.
Healthcare sites are full of product and service content, warnings, tips, resources and advice. Bad bots can scrape all of this content for malicious use. Attackers can steal a site's information and sensitive data. Not only are these bad bots stealing proprietary data, the activity sucks up the site's bandwidth. This, in turn, slows down the site's performance, which can cause downtime and additional overhead if not blocked.
Content scraping bots often create fake registrations and form fills. These need to often be purged manually, increasing customer support and administrative costs.
Patient payment portals are the conduit to the merchant account provider or bank. They're designed to make the acceptance of credit cards, debit cards, eChecks and ACH easy for the healthcare organization to accept. Inadequate defenses against malicious bot activity can flood the payment portal with authorization attempts which can overload the portal, leading to declined transactions, lost revenue, collections issues and damage the patient relationship. In extenuating circumstances, the portal provider, processor or bank can suspend or even terminate the organization's accounts.
Patient portals provide a communication ecosystem, connecting patients to the healthcare provider's network. Inadequate defenses against malicious bot activity can flood the patient portal with authorization attempts which can overload the portal, leading to declined access, compromised records, posting inaccurate transactional information, record editing or record deletion.
Smaller healthcare organizations are particularly susceptible to data loss as a result of malicious attacks because they use cloud-based services with remote back-up systems to protect from accidental or intentional deletion.
Compromised passwords increase the threat of sensitive healthcare data theft. Many healthcare companies have rigorous security policies in place to protect hardware and equipment, such as laptops and portable devices from theft. However, the remote threat from cybercriminals who are actively looking to exploit healthcare data is the more significant concern.
Connected medical devices can make up as much as 74% of the devices on a hospital’s network and are typically invisible to legacy endpoint and network security solutions.
The risk to the global healthcare system is increasing as more connected medical devices are deployed throughout the industry,
Attackers focus on exploiting device and network vulnerabilities.
Several cases have occurred in which attackers directly compromised a medical device as part of overall campaigns against hospitals.
Unique Vulnerabilities
1. Regulatory Approved Connected medical devices simply cannot support a security agent installation.
2. These devices are often managed and secured by a different team in the hospital from the rest of the data network where traditional IT management and security resides.
3. Network security used by the data network and assets (laptops, desktops, mobile devices, servers) generally can’t recognize medical device traffic and as a result, offer little protection.
A form of ID theft, ATO's access a site's patient accounts in an attempt to use them to gain unauthorized access to sensitive patient data.
Some of most common ATO attacks are perpetrated using:
Password Re-use
using the compromised password from one site on another site
Credential Stuffing
bulk attempts to gain access to user accounts)
Malware
that interferes with user sessions
Remote Access
gaining control of a user's device
Induced Payments
users are tricked into initiating a fraudulent payment
When successful, ATO's are very costly for a healthcare organization to resolve.
Residing at the edge of network, our healthcare bot and fraud mitigation, AI engine reads your weblogs and performs multi-factor authentication on each site visitor and bot, comparing them to our database and categorizing which bots are visiting your site and why.
Your verified access list (your "pristine traffic") determines which bots and human traffic sources can visit your site and by auto-generating blocking rules we're able to stop the bad bots before they reach your website.
Our healthcare bot and fraud mitigation Machine Learning engine provides you with the real-time insight you need to optimize your sales pipeline to ensure that the only traffic coming to your site is "pristine traffic".
Filtering Your Unwanted and Malicious Bot Traffic So That Only “Pristine Traffic” Remains
Very simply, our healthcare bot and fraud mitigation platform provides you with a dedicated subscription service that only allows the bot visitors you want onto your web site, so you can deal with the others. Once you have locked down your website to prevent these unauthorized bot visitors, they won’t be able to report any vulnerabilities back to the cybercriminals. While our service can’t protect you from every single attack, it is a cost-effective and vital first layer of protection. Just like the car thief – they will move onto an easier target.
our self service healthcare bot and fraud mitigation platform offers…
Pristine Traffic is a month-to-month, healthcare bot and fraud mitigation service and may be cancelled at any time prior to the next month's billing.
Automated healthcare bot and fraud mitigation provides protection for customer websites and APIs from potential malicious bot threats 24/7
All visitor traffic is run through our machine learning, multi-factor authentication engine. Our healthcare bot and fraud mitigation platform ensures that unauthorized bots are blocked and potentially malicious bots identified at the network edge, before they reach a website. What remains is a site's "Pristine Traffic".
Allows companies to ensure they have comprehensive policies in place across all internet visitors - both human and bot
Customized healthcare bot and fraud mitigation ML models to feed into visitor analytics across the enterprise
Pristine Traffic works seamlessly with Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) and Firewalls, such as Amazon AWS CloudFront and Cloudflare without an install.
Pristine's healthcare bot and fraud mitigation integration is at the edge of the network, with your existing WAF, DDos and other security layers.
Our healthcare bot and fraud mitigation saves on CPU and hosting / bandwidth requirements due to blocking unwanted Bot traffic.
Supports real-time automated healthcare bot and fraud mitigation and bot detection with full Access and Identity Management for Bots to clean up legacy access control lists
Pristine Traffic's healthcare bot and fraud mitigation Out-of-Line platform (edge of Network) that causes no network slowdowns, and doesn’t add another layer of risk, or require major infrastructure changes e.g. DNS
Pristine's healthcare bot and fraud mitigation system ensures you never block a good bot again.
Once Pristine Traffic is active, your dashboard allows you to easily see all the legitimate activity of the bot visitors. After activating your verified watch list, Pristine Traffic begins blocking unwanted traffic and fake bots. Utilizing our Ai and ML engines, our platform ensures bad bot visitors are stopped and pristine traffic, good traffic allowed in.
