The pharmaceutical industry has access to some of the most crucial data. As the industry continues to embrace digital transformation, their highly valuable and sensitive information is becoming more enticing to cybercriminals. Currently, cybercriminals are more capable and better resourced of achieving their nefarious goals than before.

In July 2020, cybersecurity authorities and agencies in Canada, United States, and the United Kingdom released a joint warning on the attacks that target COVID-19 research or vaccine development units. So, pharmaceutical companies should address serious vulnerabilities, like a compromise of privileged access and identities that result from working in constantly scaling multi-cloud and hybrid environments called cloud permissions gap. This is an attack surface, which keeps growing, leaving more companies vulnerable to attacks, resulting in devastating consequences.

The data acquired from pharmaceutical companies is very valuable. Hackers can sell the patient information they collect on the dark web. The details include financial details, address, patient history, and social security numbers. All these can be used to commit identity theft. At times, unsold data is ransomed back to companies it has been stolen from.

affected and is more likely to take on some financial and reputational damage. This is the reason it is necessary to have complete visibility across the network. It will allow you to continuously monitor the cybersecurity of third-party vendors.

human instinct and tricking an individual to click on infected emails. This is the reason improved security measures need to be taken such as limited employee network access and multi-factor authentication.

the 2019 Healthcare Cybersecurity Report by SecurityScorecard showed that the healthcare industry ranks 13th out of 18 in regards to effective cybersecurity.

It is necessary to keep in mind that hackers are unlikely to look for patient data, rather they look to interrupt operations for leveraging a ransom from the healthcare organization in exchange for stolen intellectual property or data.

Usually, cybercriminals tend to leverage human behavior for securing sensitive information including pretexting, baiting, and quid pro quo. Thus, it is important to educate and train employees on cyber-attack methods. This keeps them diligent against hackers. ​

The unique privacy challenges that the pharmaceutical industry has to navigate cause IoT to increase the cyber risk of the organization. It poses additional vulnerabilities by augmenting the attack surface. Thus, hackers have access to the network. ​

Giving complete access to individuals might result in costly and irreparable damage. For preventing that, proper management of permission and identities should be a priority for pharmaceutical companies. Organizations can take into account approaches, including machine learning, advanced analytics, and automation for keeping a tab on the identities within the network.

Granular visibility into activities and permissions of an enterprise’s non-human and human identities enables security teams to understand the risk exposures, recognize high-risk permission, and automating the rightsizing of permission without manual interference. Organizations should also continuously monitor sensitive resources and high-risk permission to enable quick rectification of policy violation or configuration drift.

RESOLVE takes your data security seriously as we know more data means more vulnerability attacks. Get your entire healthcare data discovery process done with automated deep data analysis to ensure compliance and keep sensitive data governed with the right set of rules, and policies.