Cybersecurity threats targeting organizations of all types and sizes in the public and private sectors are continuous, severe, and likely to increase for the foreseeable future. The main threat is ransomware.
Washington State
In Washington State, almost a million people found out that some of their medical information was exposed by UW Medicine. UW says someone made a configuration error in how a database was setup, exposing private data. No social security numbers or medical information was revealed, except for patient names and medical record numbers.
KOMO News, the local ABC affiliate on both TV and Radio contacted Critical Insight for an expert opinion. Chief Technology Officer Mike Simon was the voice of experience and calm.
While recognizing that any exposure of information is problematic and that there’s a small chance criminals could leverage the information, Simon told KOMO, “All that’s there is a name and account number. It would be very difficult to leverage that into something real.”
Simon also told KOMO that mistakes do happen, “Can just the right person doing just the wrong thing expose data set like this? It happens all the time.”
Vermont
On the other side of the country, the Burlington Free Press called on Critical Insight’s Chief Information Security Officer, Mike Hamilton when it was covering a major story in Vermont. The State’s Government made national news by banning state agencies and IT vendors from using products made by Huawei Technologies Company, ZTE Corporation, Hytera Communications Corporation, Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Company, or Dahua Technology Company. The ban includes Kaspersky Anti-Virus.
The Free Press wanted an outside perspective and got one from Hamilton. “’I do think it’s a smart move,’ Hamilton said, noting that governments across the country are paying attention to security risks with Huawei and other products.”
Critical Insight supports companies, healthcare organizations, and public sector entities everyday to achieve better information security outcomes. News organizations call on Critical Insight because of our depth of expertise.
Neither story on February 20 involved a specific breach resulting from an attack, but companies, governments, and organizations can improve their security posture with authentic Managed Detection and Response. Critical Insight puts its depth of expertise into its US-based Critical Insight security operations centers in which real people leverage technology to watch for threats on customers’ networks. As evidenced in both stories above, computers can’t solve everything. It’s good to know that Critical Insight’s experts have your back.
