Cybersecurity, Healthcare, and Dashlabs.ai

Originally Published on: 18 March 2022

On September 13, 2021, a COVID-19 test registration system in Illinois was hit by a cyberattack. The attack exposed the data of potentially millions of people - their names, date of birth, gender, phone numbers, and email addresses - on the open web for anyone to potentially see on the system's website.

Cyberattacks pose a threat to healthcare because the industry is believed to be a ripe and lucrative target for bad agents. It is high time that healthcare organizations and companies devote time and resources to cybersecurity because having to deal with cyberattacks can be far more expensive.

What is Cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity entails the practices which aim to protect networks, systems, and software platforms from cyber or digital attacks. These cyberattacks are initiated by bad agents or bad hackers. When a cyberattack is successful, it can result in serious network and user problems, such as identity theft, extortion attempts, and loss of important data.

Both business and consumers benefit from strong cybersecurity programs. For businesses, it ensures safe and smooth processes in the work operations on the one hand. Weak cybersecurity can paralyze the business. On the other hand, consumers can feel safe while using the platform because they know that their personal information is safe from threats.

What does cybersecurity have to do with healthcare?

In the advanced information age, almost all aspects of our society have increasingly adapted to digitalization. The more industries rely on the internet for their operations and processes, the greater the opportunity is for bad agents to take advantage of your vulnerabilities.

Significantly, patient information heavily constitutes the data within healthcare institutions and laboratory facilities. This includes their names, addresses, medical condition, etc. Crucially, cybersecurity and healthcare are interrelated. To illustrate this, all diagnostic testing requires patient information. In the Philippines alone, for instance, the week of February 28 and March 6, 2022 recorded an average of 24,118 in the overall number of COVID-19 tests per day. In scale, this is an enormous amount of patient information and data that could potentially be used for different types of cyberattacks when poorly protected in terms of cybersecurity.

How are patients and consumers affected?

Since patient data and information are integrated within facility softwares and platforms, the lack of strong cybersecurity protocols is an opportunity for attackers to capitalize on. This means that cyberattacks and the loss of access to medical devices and platforms could hold patients and their data hostage. The harms can range from having the consumer's medical condition publicized to a temporary shutdown of a testing area. Crucially, cyberattacks are serious threats to patient safety, health, and privacy.

How does Dashlabs.ai ensure cybersecurity within the platform?

Since its establishment, Dashlabs.ai is secured by Secuna, a Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) recognized cybersecurity platform that assesses vulnerabilities in our platform against bad agents who attempt to hack the platform for harmful uses. However, not all hackers are bad. Through Secuna, good agents, or good hackers, simulate a cyberattack on our platform and networks in order to collaborate with Dashlabs.ai for solutions on potential vulnerabilities. Simply put, we hire the good guys to hack our systems and work on these issues before the bad guys do.

Moreover, we ensure cybersecurity in our platform through the Zero-Trust framework which requires all users, whether employees or not, to be authenticated and authorized to access software controls. We implement least-privileged access controls within our network - not assumed trust - to ensure that our patients, clients, and users have the safest Dashlabs.ai experience.

At Dashlabs.ai, we believe that innovation through automation should not only bring convenience and efficiency onto the table. It should more importantly value security as a fundamental part of the user experience.