Health IT Security: Supervise Users with Privileged Access Management

Privileged access management helps your health IT security team manage and audit the activities of all privileged users.

Healthcare organizations face unique challenges when it comes to IT security:

• They are high profile targets – each compromised health record can be sold on the black market for $10-$50 and includes all the information needed for identity theft.
• They must meet comprehensive regulatory and compliance standards – which are constantly changing and evolving as new technologies develop.
• They have unique privacy responsibilities – besides the legal necessity to protect information, doctors also have a moral obligation to protect the health and privacy of their patients.
• They must accommodate to rapidly evolving technologies –like the added threats of e-health initiatives, bring your own device (BYOD) policies, smart devices, and the Internet of Things (IoT), all of which create complicated issues.

All of these factors come together to create a problematic health IT security threat environment. In order to handle these evolving threats, healthcare organizations must have a robust privileged access management (PAM) system.

Health organizations face unique challenges that create a complicated health IT security threat environment.

Who are Privileged Users?

Within a healthcare organization, there can be hundreds if not thousands of employees. These include doctors, nurses and administrators, as well as external providers, cloud providers, automated users, and 3^rd party contractors.

Everyone has certain job responsibilities that require specific permissions sets — but credential sharing is shockingly commonplace and often enables devastating data breaches through the abuse of privileged credentials.

Up to 80% of all data breaches are the result of privileged credentials being handled incorrectly. These privileged credentials allow users to:

• Change system configurations
• Install software
• Create new users and modify existing users
• Access and modify secure data
• Modify the administrative privileges of themselves or others

All of these functions are necessary for maintaining the health IT security infrastructure, but when in the wrong hands these privileges can be used for malicious purposes. Users can override other protocols or exploit data and then hide the evidence.

Privileged User Threats

There are three types of privileged user threats that allow data breaches to occur within the health IT security sector.

1. Intentional actors – use their own credentials to deliberately steal or modify information internally.
2. Unintentional actors – accidentally give up their credentials by being careless with security protocols (i.e. sharing passwords with others).
3. Compromised users – whose credentials have been stolen without their knowledge (usually through spear phishing or other targeted attacks).

Privileged access management can help your organization monitor all privileged users to prevent internal and external threats.

Privileged Access Management

What is it?

Privileged access management helps your health IT security team manage and audit the activities of all privileged users. A robust solution helps enforce the policies that restrict privileged users from bypassing or inappropriately accessing security systems. This helps protect the organization from insider threats (including users attempting to upgrade their access), and monitor and control users who may have unknowingly been compromised. Privileged access management solutions consist of three main parts:

• Access management: Provides single sign-on to all authorized applications and devices for privileged users while providing a single pane to create, track, and revoke privileged
• Password vault: Keeps all passwords secure in one location, so users never have direct access to root passwords.
• Session manager: Monitors and controls all actions that occur during a privileged session. Can prevent forbidden commands, terminate sessions, or create alerts based on user activity.  Creates inviolate audit trails that cannot be changed or modified, so malicious users can’t cover their tracks.

Privileged access management helps your health IT security team protect patient privacy, achieve compliance, and most importantly ensure security.

Why Do You Need it?

Privileged access management helps your health IT security team in the following ways:

• Grant and limit privileges to users based on only the systems they need
• Grant access only when needed and revoke it as soon as the need expires (a user leaves the organization or is transitioning into a new role)
• Eliminate local/direct system passwords for privileged users
• Centrally manage access over all systems
• Create an audit trail that cannot be altered for all privileged operations

…all from one centralized system.

Why the WALLIX Bastion PAM Solution?

The WALLIX Bastion is the privileged access management system you need to improve your health IT security operations. Our straightforward architecture integrates with your existing security infrastructure and can quickly be up and running within one to two days.

The WALLIX Bastion PAM solution has adaptable architecture, is easy to use, and is quick to deploy. There are no agents to cause integration and maintenance nightmares.

The WALLIX solution provides a complete and searchable audit trail. Our privileged access management system records all sessions on all devices including command lines and graphics. Powerful OCR makes even RDP sessions easily searchable. Administrators can view this information in real time or search for it later.

Integrating privileged session information with your existing security infrastructure reinforces and enhances its abilities. By supporting your SIEM with session information, the SIEM  will produce more accurate correlation analytics and alerts. WALLIX quickly and easily integrates with all major SIEM systems.

Health IT security needs privileged access management to protect privacy, achieve compliance, and most importantly ensure security within the organization.

Ready to protect your organization with the WALLIX solution? Contact us for more details on our robust privileged access management solution or click below :