Why NETSCOUT Prioritises Cyber Resilience in Healthcare

A thought leadership piece by Darren Anstee, CTO for Security at NETSCOUT.

Cyberattacks are a pervasive threat across every industry, but in healthcare, the consequences are measured in far more than just financial loss or reputational damage.

When a healthcare provider’s digital infrastructure is compromised, the disruption to patient care is immediate, tangible and can impact patient treatments and outcomes.

This unfortunate reality was starkly demonstrated by recent attacks on the NHS, whereby threat actors accessed sensitive patient data and forced major London hospitals to cancel critical operations and appointments, leaving thousands without the care they needed.

With the real-world impact of a cyberattack being a delayed diagnosis or a rescheduled surgery, the conversation around cybersecurity risk fundamentally changes.

For healthcare providers, achieving a state of cyber resilience is not just a strategic goal – it is an absolute necessity to fulfil their remit.

The unique vulnerability of healthcare

So why is healthcare such an attractive target for cybercriminals?

In short, the sector represents a perfect storm of vulnerability and high-value data.

Healthcare organisations manage vast quantities of highly sensitive personally identifiable data, as well as protected health information, both of which are valuable resources for cybercriminals seeking to extort organisations and people, and commit fraud. 

Furthermore, the critical nature of healthcare operations creates immense pressure to restore services quickly, making healthcare providers prime targets for ransomware attacks, given they are more likely to pay ransoms to avoid further disruptions to patient care.

The modern healthcare IT environment has also become increasingly complex. It now includes a sprawling digital ecosystem of interconnected medical devices (IoMT), often running older unpatched software, as well as shared workstations and distributed networks.

Couple this with an under-pressure workforce and targeted phishing campaigns are more likely to succeed, giving threat actors a foothold they can then exploit. 

Traditional, perimeter-based security is no longer sufficient to defend these environments against today’s threats. This is like trying to diagnose diseases by looking only for a single symptom – lots of things will get missed.

The power of complete visibility

To effectively defend themselves, healthcare institutions must shift from a reactive to a more proactive security approach. The foundation of this shift is having complete visibility.

After all, organisations cannot protect themselves from what they cannot see. In the healthcare setting, visibility means having a deep, consistent real-time understanding of all activity occurring across the entire digital ecosystem. 

This can be achieved through systematic, continuous monitoring of network traffic and other telemetry sources, to establish an understanding of normal behaviour. When IT and security teams know what ‘normal’ looks like, it becomes easier to spot the subtle anomalies that often serve as the earliest indicators of a breach – and beyond this, it also makes triage and investigation much faster.  

Just as doctors use scans and vital signs to get a complete understanding of a patient’s problems, complete, consistent visibility of network activity is key to observability, which is in turn, key to managing cyber risk. 

Turning insight into action

By catching threats as early as possible, organisations can neutralise them before they escalate into a full-blown data breach or ransomware attack that disrupts patient services.

Having a complete, end-to-end picture of what is going on drastically reduces the time an attacker can remain hidden within the network, minimising their opportunity to cause damage.

But no article would be complete without considering how AI can help.

While threat actors are increasingly using AI to launch more sophisticated attacks, the technology is also enhancing defensive capabilities.

This is where AI for IT and Security Operations can offer an advantage.

By applying ML algorithms to curated, consistent, high-fidelity data, AI platforms can quickly identify unusual behaviours and complex threat patterns that can evade human analysis. 

They can then automate responses to block potential threats in real time, reducing the workload of overstretched security teams and accelerating response.

But, the effectiveness and reliability of these platforms are very much dependent on the quality and consistency of the datasets they ingest – context is everything in AI and ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’ still very much applies.

Ultimately, by investing in solutions that provide consistent, high-value datasets to observability platforms, healthcare providers can ensure their cyber defences are robust enough to rise to the challenge.

In healthcare, protecting digital infrastructure is synonymous with protecting a patient –  therefore, providers need to make sure they have the right diagnostics in place.