Cyber Hygiene Methodology for Raising Cybersecurity and Data Privacy Awareness in Health Care Organizations: Concept Study.

BACKGROUND: Cyber threats are increasing across all business sectors, with health care being a prominent domain. In response to the ever-increasing threats, health care organizations (HOs) are enhancing the technical measures with the use of cybersecurity controls and other advanced solutions for further protection. Despite the need for technical controls, humans are evidently the weakest link in the cybersecurity posture of HOs. This suggests that addressing the human aspects of cybersecurity is a key step toward managing cyber-physical risks. In practice, HOs are required to apply general cybersecurity and data privacy guidelines that focus on human factors. However, there is limited literature on the methodologies and procedures that can assist in successfully mapping these guidelines to specific controls (interventions), including awareness activities and training programs, with a measurable impact on personnel. To this end, tools and structured methodologies for assisting higher management in selecting the minimum number of required controls that will be most effective on the health care workforce are highly desirable. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to introduce a cyber hygiene (CH) methodology that uses a unique survey-based risk assessment approach for raising the cybersecurity and data privacy awareness of different employee groups in HOs. The main objective was to identify the most effective strategy for managing cybersecurity and data privacy risks and recommend targeted human-centric controls that are tailored to organization-specific needs. METHODS: The CH methodology relied on a cross-sectional, exploratory survey study followed by a proposed risk-based survey data analysis approach. First, survey data were collected from 4 different employee groups across 3 European HOs, covering 7 categories of cybersecurity and data privacy risks. Next, survey data were transcribed and fitted into a proposed risk-based approach matrix that translated risk levels to strategies for managing the risks. RESULTS: A list of human-centric controls and implementation levels was created. These controls were associated with risk categories, mapped to risk strategies for managing the risks related to all employee groups. Our mapping empowered the computation and subsequent recommendation of subsets of human-centric controls to implement the identified strategy for managing the overall risk of the HOs. An indicative example demonstrated the application of the CH methodology in a simple scenario. Finally, by applying the CH methodology in the health care sector, we obtained results in the form of risk markings; identified strategies to manage the risks; and recommended controls for each of the 3 HOs, each employee group, and each risk category. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed CH methodology improves the CH perception and behavior of personnel in the health care sector and provides risk strategies together with a list of recommended human-centric controls for managing a wide range of cybersecurity and data privacy risks related to health care employees.

Influence of Human Factors on Cyber Security within Healthcare Organisations: A Systematic Review.

Background: Cybersecurity is increasingly becoming a prominent concern among healthcare providers in adopting digital technologies for improving the quality of care delivered to patients. The recent reports on cyber attacks, such as ransomware and WannaCry, have brought to life the destructive nature of such attacks upon healthcare. In complement to cyberattacks, which have been targeted against the vulnerabilities of information technology (IT) infrastructures, a new form of cyber attack aims to exploit human vulnerabilities; such attacks are categorised as social engineering attacks. Following an increase in the frequency and ingenuity of attacks launched against hospitals and clinical environments with the intention of causing service disruption, there is a strong need to study the level of awareness programmes and training activities offered to the staff by healthcare organisations. Objective: The objective of this systematic review is to identify commonly encountered factors that cybersecurity postures of a healthcare organisation, resulting from the ignorance of cyber threat to healthcare. The systematic review aims to consolidate the current literature being reported upon human behaviour resulting in security gaps that mitigate the cyber defence strategy adopted by healthcare organisations. Additionally, the paper also reviews the organisational risk assessment methodology implemented and the policies being adopted to strengthen cybersecurity. Methods: The topic of cybersecurity within healthcare and the clinical environment has attracted the interest of several researchers, resulting in a broad range of literature. The inclusion criteria for the articles in the review stem from the scope of the five research questions identified. To this end, we conducted seven search queries across three repositories, namely (i) PubMed®/MED-LINE; (ii) Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL); and (iii) Web of Science (WoS), using key words related to cybersecurity awareness, training, organisation risk assessment methodologies, policies and recommendations adopted as counter measures within health care. These were restricted to around the last 12 years. Results: A total of 70 articles were selected to be included in the review, which addresses the complexity of cybersecurity measures adopted within the healthcare and clinical environments. The articles included in the review highlight the evolving nature of cybersecurity threats stemming from exploiting IT infrastructures to more advanced attacks launched with the intent of exploiting human vulnerability. A steady increase in the literature on the threat of phishing attacks evidences the growing threat of social engineering attacks. As a countermeasure, through the review, we identified articles that provide methodologies resulting from case studies to promote cybersecurity awareness among stakeholders. The articles included highlight the need to adopt cyber hygiene practices among healthcare professionals while accessing social media platforms, which forms an ideal test bed for the attackers to gain insight into the life of healthcare professionals. Additionally, the review also includes articles that present strategies adopted by healthcare organisations in countering the impact of social engineering attacks. The evaluation of the cybersecurity risk assessment of an organisation is another key area of study reported in the literature that recommends the organisation of European and international standards in countering social engineering attacks. Lastly, the review includes articles reporting on national case studies with an overview of the economic and societal impact of service disruptions encountered due to cyberattacks. Discussion: One of the limitations of the review is the subjective ranking of the authors associated to the relevance of literature to each of the research questions identified. We also acknowledge the limited amount of literature that focuses on human factors of cybersecurity in health care in general; therefore, the search queries were formulated using well-established cybersecurity related topics categorised according to the threats, risk assessment and organisational strategies reported in the literature.