“Changes brought by COVID-19 have produced a corresponding shift in federal cybersecurity posture, particularly among agencies responsible for overseeing health care and medical IT systems.”
“These adjustments encompass both more comprehensive remote security as well as growing vigilance to cyber threats that emerged with particular force during the pandemic. Speakers at the GovernmentCIO Media CyberScape: Health Care event discussed how the rapid shift to telework created newfound security risks that federal agencies had to address.”
“’The way the environment has changed completely and fundamentally is that now we have not just devices to consider, but we have purview over security for all the infrastructure that exists within the broader telework environment. So that’s the routers and the switches in people’s homes. It’s their personal devices in some cases. So things like multi-factor authentication became super important,’ said Sean Frazier, federal chief security officer at Okta.”
“This shift to telework and a greater focus on remote device security has encouraged federal technology leadership to reevaluate their approach to cybersecurity more broadly, encouraging a more dynamic and responsive posture that will be better suited to staying ahead of technological advancement and the evolving threat landscape.”
“’Even in the best of times prior to the pandemic we had an overreliance on the perimeter at any one organization. It was always, ‘If it was behind your firewall, you could protect it,’ which we’ve generally found is not true and hasn’t been true for a while,’ said Jessica Wilkerson, cyber policy advisor at the Food and Drug Administration. ‘There was this mad rush of everything now being outside of the perimeter. So the big complication of having to adjust safety best practices on the fly in the middle of several other concurrent crises that were happening all at the same time has been a major challenge and will probably remain a major challenge. Because it’s highly unlikely that we’re going to go back to exactly the way that things were before…'” Read the full article here.
Source: COVID-19 Has Reshaped Federal Health IT Security – By Adam Patterson, June 25, 2021. GovernmentCIO.
