Healthcare CIOs Struggle to Secure Networks
Health-care CIOs must navigate a complex skein of regulations, doctors, hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, patients and insurance companies. And complex are the networks that connect them all.
Covenant Health’s case is a good example of this interdependence. Clark’s infrastructure nearly stopped Slammer. The partner company that infected his network told him its own network was infected by yet another partner. Other health-care CIOs Clark knows say Slammer slammed them when employees accessed networks from home. The trend worries Clark.
"We try to impress on people that outages will happen if this continues, but they don’t think it will really happen," he says. "What you learn from this is that it doesn’t take much to affect health care. We were exploited by one little vulnerability and a crude virus that just overwhelmed everybody."
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