COVID-19 Healthcare Cybersecurity: Best Practices for a Remote Workforce

COVID-19 Healthcare:
Cybersecurity Best Practices
for a Remote Workforce

© 2020 Health Catalyst
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COVID-19 Healthcare Cybersecurity
Measures to stem the COVID-19
pandemic are driving more of the U.S.
workforce to remote, or teleworking,
arrangements, including healthcare
industry personnel who can operate
from home (e.g., financial, administra-
tive, healthcare IT teams, and other
non-patient-facing roles).

COVID-19 Healthcare Cybersecurity
In keeping with state- and community
wide shelter-in-place orders and bans
on nonessential travel, work-from-home
practices reduce person-to-person
contact in an effort control the
transmission of the novel coronavirus
within populations and families.
The well-intentioned transition to
remote work, however, carries an
underlying risk: increased exposure
to cybersecurity threats.

The State of Cybersecurity Amid COVID-19
The simple equation of more users accessing
and relying on the internet from more places
exposes cybersecurity vulnerabilities, as does
the possibility of using home internet connect-
ions and personal devices that don’t have the
same level of security as corporate IT-
managed resources.
Additionally, collective rising anxiety, fear,
and curiosity make internet users more
vulnerable to malicious cyberattacks through
false communications and information
sources that appear legitimate.
RISK = Likelihood x Impact

Add to the above factors an upward trend in
remote work overall before COVID-19-driven
changes (a 159 percent increase in remote
work between 2005 and 2017) and—for
healthcare providers, specifically—an
increased incidence of ransomware
attacks of 350 percent in Q4, 2019.

In addition, amid the COVID-19 pandemic,
the frequency of reported social engineering
attacks across the globe has increased.
For example, confirmed threat vectors have
used fake COVID-19 impact maps to spread
malware that steals passwords.
These threats have mocked a legitimate and
trusted source—John Hopkins Medicine.

Awareness of rising cybersecurity risks
during the COVID-19 pandemic as well
as cyber-hygiene best practices will help
keep an increasingly remote healthcare
workforce and their organizations safe.

A Time for Extra Vigilant Cyber-Safe Best Practices
Remote workers can increase their online safety by refreshing and ramping
up cyber-hygiene best practices:
Recognize and Report Suspicious Emails Protect Home Internet Connections

Scams during the COVID-19 pandemic
may appear to be from reputable public
health authorities (e.g., Health and
Human Services, the World Health
Organization, or the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention) and
reference COVID-19, coronavirus, and
related topics to exploit a sense of trust
in what may seem a known source.
Suspicious email patterns to watch for
include these events:
Recognize and Report Suspicious Emails (Phishing)
Alerts about suspicious
activity or log-in attempts.
Alerts about problems
with accounts or
payment information.
Requests to confirm
personal information.
Fake invoices.
Requests to click on a link
to make a payment or
update payment details.
Alerts regarding eligibility
to register for a
government refund.
An email impersonating
a known and trusted
company.
An alert that an
account is on hold due
to a billing problem.
An email with a generic
greeting (e.g., “Hi, Dear.”).

Follow organizational guidance on
how to report suspicious emails.
Many organizations will have an
anti-phishing program with utilities
for reporting built into their
corporate email clients.
Recognize and Report Suspicious Emails (Phishing)

Protect Home Internet Connections
Corporate IT and infrastructure
engineering teams often have a
number of controls in place that
protect internet connections within
the office environment.
When connecting from home,
however, certain practices will
ensure security and quality:

Bandwidth
As COVID-19 drives more of the global workforce
home, bandwidth demands increase.
Remote workers should ensure they’re getting
the bandwidth they’re contracted for with their
internet services provider (ISP).
Tools including speedtest.net or fast.com
can measure home bandwidth.
Some ISPs have been known to place
data caps, or limits, on their services,
but in light of the pandemic, many ISPs
are removing caps voluntarily.

Connectivity
Individuals using Wi-Fi or a hotspot at home,
need to ensure they’re using a modern
encryption tool, such as Wi-Fi Protected
Access II (WPA2), with a strong preshared key
(PSK), that’s equivalent to a password, to
establish a connection to the home network.
Never connect over public Wi-Fi, such as
airports, coffee shops, libraries, community
wireless access points, or other connections
that aren’t verifiably secure. To access the
internet away from home, tethering to a mobile
hotspot (smartphone) is the safer option.

Virtual private network (VPN) with multifactor authentication (MFA)
A VPN encrypts information to tunnel it
from its source to its destination.
Many organizations’ corporate IT and
infrastructure engineering teams maintain
a VPN infrastructure to keep team
members secure.
With MFA, a device user must successfully
present two or more pieces of evidence
(e.g., codes smartphone apps generate)
to an authentication mechanism to gain
access to a network.

Corporate-issued devices
Remote workers connecting to their
corporate network or partner-hosted
environments should only use corporate-
issued devices—versus personal devices.
These devices likely have the necessary
safeguards to work securely and are
managed and updated regularly by the
corporate IT team.

Web Browsing
Internet users need to be cautious about the
sites they visit.
As mentioned earlier, there are confirmed
malicious websites related to coronavirus that
may appear legitimate but are engineered to
infect devices through a web browser.
While conducting sensitive transactions, verify
the sites used are secure and implement
secure socket layer protocols (SSL) with the
website to secure the traffic between the
originating device and the destination site.

Phishing (email), vishing (voice calls), and smishing (SMS)
Increased social engineering attacks like
these demand extra diligence.
If a remote worker identifies suspicious
activity, they need to report it to their
organization, such as with a reporting email
utility built into their corporate email or to the
organization’s information security team.

Video Conferencing
Virtual conference room users need
to inventory their meeting attendees.
Increasingly, known cyberattacks
may attempt to allow eavesdroppers
by randomly identifying links to
meetings.
Virtual conference hosts should
require a password to join the
meeting and ask anyone unfamiliar
to identify themselves.

Passwords
Many corporate IT and infrastructure
engineering teams set requirements
on minimum password lengths,
composition, and complexity.
Strong passwords and long pass-
phrases are more secure than
shorter passwords, and users need
to rotate passwords at least every
90 days.

Passwords
Enabling MFA, as applications and
systems allow, supplements passwords
security; two-factor authentication
(one factor the user knows, such as a
password, combined with another they
have been provided or receive digitally,
such as a one-time password token) is
an effective authentication practice.

Stay patched
A corporate-issued device is likely managed
centrally and receives updates via a systems
management and deployment solutions (e.g.,
Quest KACE, Microsoft System Center
Configuration Manager, SolarWinds Patch
Manager, etc.); remote workers should keep up
with these updates as they reach their device.
Users are responsible for patching (downloading
and applying the latest firmware update from
the vendor) home infrastructure, such as routers
and firewalls.

Other
For additional advice on avoiding phishing and social
engineering attacks, see the Department of Homeland Security.

Steadfast Safeguards for Uncertain Times
In a time marked by global uncertainty,
the growing remote workforce can protect
their personal and organizational internet
security by relying on a known entity—
cyber-hygiene best practices.
Despite unprecedented change and
adaptation, individuals working from
home who follow proven cybersecurity
guidelines, with some added awareness
of COVID-19-specific threats, will keep
themselves and their organizations cyber-
safe through the pandemic and beyond.

For more information:
“This book is a fantastic piece of work”
– Robert Lindeman MD, FAAP, Chief Physician Quality Officer

More about this topic
Link to original article for a more in-depth discussion.
COVID-19 Healthcare Cybersecurity: Best Practices for a Remote Workforce
Health Catalyst Plans to Support Health System Clients’ COVID-19 Response with Three Initial
Solutions Focused on Patient Tracking, Public Health Surveillance and Staff Augmentation Support
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Health Catalyst unveils two systems and a service for COVID-19 response (Healthcare IT News)
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Other Clinical Quality Improvement Resources
Click to read additional information at www.healthcatalyst.com
Kevin is the Chief Information Security Officer at Health Catalyst. Prior to joining with Health Catalyst,
he worked for Blue Cross of Idaho in Boise, Idaho as a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
Development Manager and worked there for five years. Before Blue Cross of Idaho, Kevin worked in
the Hi-Tech sector within e-commerce developing enabling technologies for Micron, a Semiconductor
Manufacturer to sell and distribute their product portfolio to consumers. Kevin has an Associates in
Political Science from BYI-Idaho, a Bachelor’s in Business Administration in Computer Information
Systems from Boise State University and a Master’s of Science in Medical Informatics from
Northwestern University. He continues to teach as an Instructor at Northwestern in the Masters of
Medical Informatics Program and also Computer Science at a local community college.
Kevin Scharnhorst

Other Clinical Quality Improvement Resources
Click to read additional information at www.healthcatalyst.com
Health Catalyst is a mission-driven data warehousing, analytics and outcomes-improvement
company that helps healthcare organizations of all sizes improve clinical, financial, and operational
outcomes needed to improve population health and accountable care. Our proven enterprise data
warehouse (EDW) and analytics platform helps improve quality, add efficiency and lower costs in
support of more than 65 million patients for organizations ranging from the largest US health system
to forward-thinking physician practices.
Health Catalyst was recently named as the leader in the enterprise healthcare BI market in
improvement by KLAS, and has received numerous best-place-to work awards including Modern
Healthcare in 2013, 2014, and 2015, as well as other recognitions such as “Best Place to work for
Millenials, and a “Best Perks for Women.”

COVID-19 Healthcare Cybersecurity: Best Practices for a Remote Workforce

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