“The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is embracing a new cybersecurity routine after the ongoing public health crisis placed a new target on the agency and malicious actors boosted their efforts to infiltrate the agency and access sensitive data, HHS CISO Janet Vogel said this week.”
“Vogel said the agency’s cybersecurity benefitted from the department’s under-the-radar status prior to the coronavirus pandemic. The health crisis, however, brought unwelcomed attention from adversaries.”
“’When it comes to cybersecurity, HHS wasn’t thought of as a premier area and we really enjoyed that type of anonymity in the past, just a bit under the radar,’ Vogel said at MeriTalk’s August 18 Protect and Secure: Proactive Strategies to Manage Vulnerabilities webinar. ‘But that’s all over now with COVID-19 and we are strengthening our program in many ways every day,’ she said.”
“In March, HHS faced a distributed denial of service attack that forced the agency to up its cyber protocol. According to Vogel, HHS ‘doubled down’ on cybersecurity activities and collaboration during the pandemic to keep its networks and data protected.”
“’The denial of service attack came on us very quickly and it ramped up faster than we really anticipated it could or would,’ Vogel admitted. Since then, HHS has implemented new cyber programs and procedures to mitigate the possibility of a future attack…” Read the full article here.
Source: Pandemic Advances Cybersecurity Efforts at HHS as Agency Becomes Bigger Target, CISO Says – By Katie Malone, August 19, 2020. MeriTalk.
