The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was signed into law close to three decades ago. HIPAA was initially comprised of two primary rules: (1) The Privacy Rule, which establishes standards to protect individuals' medical records and other personal [...]
Healthcare organizations are under attack from all sides of their businesses. We are seeing a major increase in directed ransomware and other cyber-attacks on a variety of healthcare organizations and their partners. These attacks are crippling operations, while also [...]
With all the recent headlines regarding cyber security breaches, it is easy for companies to forget about the physical security controls they must put into place. This crucial element of the HIPAA Security Rule will vary in implementation depending on [...]
By Oli Thordarson, CEO of Alvaka Networks I was recently asked to write a short column on “What three things healthcare organizations can do to help protect their organizations from cyber risk and security breaches?” for the ABL Organization. It [...]
Orange County, CA – I just read about a new product announcement, New version of L0phtCrack makes cracking Windows passwords easier than ever. At Alvaka we used to do a hacking demo during a lunch and learn. Rex Frank would usually do the demo by doing a SQL Injection attack and bumping out to the command prompt. From there he would download the SAM (Security Access Manager) file and then use L0phtCrack to decode a password right in front of the eyes of everyone. Nearly everyone was shocked beyond compare. Of course that approach is now a bit dated, but it showed our guests just how vulnerable unpatched and inadequately secured systems can be. From the start of the demo to the revelation of an account password would only take five o
Beware of Jigsaw, the newest ransomware trojan. It does not wait for you to pay a ransom. Within the first 24 hours it deletes files and then accelerates the process exponentially to show you they mean business in the nastiest [...]
Tustin, CA - The most interesting part of this BlueCross BlueShield announcement is not that they found the breach on August 5th. What is interesting when you read further into the announcement is that they say “Our investigation further revealed [...]
Alvaka Networks COO/CISO Kevin McDonald is a featured author in this month’s CAPG Health magazine. He writes about the obligations under HIPAA and HITECH to protect health information and how failure to do so can cost $359 per record breached. [...]
A recent article in the Los Angeles Times says, “A new analysis of government records, published Tuesday in the journal JAMA, found that close to a thousand large data breaches affected 29 million medical records between 2010 and 2013. Nearly 60% [...]
There are many other benefits to applying software patches including in some cases adding features, fixing bugs that make the software run slow or not work right. All software needs to be patched. Whether the software sits on a disk and runs on a server, resides on a chip within a firewall, or is an app that is in your tablet devices, it all needs to periodically be updated and patched in order to be secure.
The following list of 18 software patching best practices is what we follow at Alvaka Networks when delivering on our Patchworx(SM) Patch Management Service. It is important to note that all these steps are important, but not always are all them utilized or they can be utilized in different ways depending upon the needs of the client. Like us, you will need to decide what your patch management plan needs to look like to best suit your needs.
18 recommended best practices for patching your software:
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