CyberShield Protects Health Organisations From Increasing Cyberattacks

Medical IT Advisors’ cybersecurity service, CyberShield, has been launched to protect healthcare organisations against the rising number of cyberattacks and is being offered free for the first four months.

Medical IT Advisors director Faustin Roman says the DNS Firewall is a low-touch low-cost security solution that does not require any hardware or software, just a small configuration change to get protected against spyware threats and phishing attacks.

CyberShield is specifically designed for the healthcare sector by monitoring attacks against healthcare organisations and warning others about them.

Faustin says New Zealand organisations have experienced a high volume of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in recent weeks and CERTNZ has issued an advisory regarding an increased rate of phishing. These threats are part of a growing business cybersecurity risk from Covid-19 vaccine themed attacks and business email compromise to phishing from trusted domains and plain website hacking.

CyberShield leverages Medical IT Advisors’ NZ Health Threat Intelligence Sharing Platform, launched at the beginning of the year and the only one of its kind in New Zealand, which provides visibility of the thousands of attacks on Kiwi healthcare organisations every day.

The platform provides a type of ‘herd immunity’ as once a threat has been identified in one organisation, it can be added to the platform and synchronised to ‘immunise’ all other users against it, Faustin explains.

CyberShield.NZ managed security service is based on the partnership and infrastructure provided by InternetNZ for the Defenz DNS Firewall. The goal of the partnership is to improve the healthcare cybersecurity with the adoption of the service across the sector.

InternetNZ commercial director David Morrison says after launching Defenz late last year, they realised the value of adding local threat feeds such as the NZ Health Threat Intelligence Sharing Platform.

“The health sector holds a lot of sensitive personal data and we are seeing a rise in cyber activity, particularly over this Covid-19 period. Any organisation that holds high value data should be thinking of themselves as a target and protecting themselves from attack,” he says.

“The reality is this is only going to increase and it’s really easy to set-up this extra layer of security.”

NZ Health IT chief executive Scott Arrol says the industry body supports the initiative as he believes there needs to be a far greater focus on cybersecurity.

“This is a battlefield that’s fast becoming a war,” he says.

The CyberShield subscription includes onboarding and incident response service, which means attacks are monitored and blocked, users are alerted and if necessary, Medical IT Advisors will provide immediate advice on how to respond.

Faustin believes it is important for the health sector to work together against bad actors online and with four months free, why would you not try it?

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