Healthcare organizations face unique cybersecurity challenges due to their hybrid IT (information technology) environments, sensitive data, and resource constraints.

As the industry adopts cloud and SaaS technologies, advanced threat detection and incident response capabilities are critical. Behavioral detections that monitor for anomalies across on-premises, clouds, and other systems can help healthcare entities detect sophisticated threats. Traditional indicators of compromise focused detection tend to be less effective in the healthcare industry due to attackers' ability to change tactics quickly. Behavioral detections establish a baseline of normal operational activity and workflows to identify deviations that could indicate compromise.

By incorporating healthcare-specific threat intelligence into behavioral detections, detections can be tuned for the unique risks faced by these organizations. Nation-state actors target healthcare entities like pharmaceutical companies, while ransomware groups exploit hospitals' digital transformation and resource constraints. Understanding these threat vectors helps focus monitoring on high-risk behaviors.

As healthcare data moves to cloud services, behavioral analytics must span hybrid environments. Attacks often begin by compromising cloud accounts or leveraging insider access, then spreading laterally. Cross-correlating signals from on-premises systems, cloud workloads, and IoT (Internet of Things) can connect the dots between initial entry points and subsequent activity across disparate systems.

Prioritizing data integrity monitoring also aligns with healthcare's mission to protect sensitive patient information. Behavioral analytics can detect anomalies indicating attempts to alter or exfiltrate large volumes of records.

Three Ways Behavioral Detections Aid Healthcare Security

Behavioral detections have emerged as a powerful tool for detecting APTs and insider threats in these environments. Here's how it can be applied effectively in the healthcare context:

1. Establishing Baselines

Behavioral analytics systems begin by establishing baselines of normal user behavior within cloud and SaaS environments. This includes patterns of data access, time of activity, types of actions performed, and more. In a healthcare setting, this might involve understanding typical access patterns for different roles, such as nurses, doctors, administrators, and researchers.

2. Detecting Anomalies

Once baselines are set up, the system can identify deviations that may indicate malicious activity. For example, a researcher suddenly downloading large volumes of confidential data from a cloud-based storage system.

3. Continuous Monitoring

Healthcare environments are dynamic, with staff often working irregular hours and accessing systems from various locations. Behavioral analytics systems must provide continuous monitoring to detect threats in real-time across the entire digital footprint, including cloud services, SaaS applications, and on-premises systems.

How Mitiga Builds Behavioral Detections for Healthcare

The Mitiga incident response platform integrates many critical features to provide healthcare organizations with a comprehensive security solution. Among the capabilities that are critical to enabling behavioral detections are:

• ‍Near Real-Time Monitoring: Mitiga continuously monitors user behavior across cloud and SaaS environments, ensuring that potential threats are detected in real-time. This proactive approach enables healthcare organizations to respond swiftly to emerging threats.
• Advanced Threat Intelligence: Mitiga combines behavioral analytics with threat intelligence to identify indicators of attack (IOAs) and indicators of compromise (IOCs). This integration enhances the accuracy of threat detection and enables more effective threat hunting.‍
• Automated Forensics: The Mitiga platform automates the forensic analysis of security incidents, providing detailed timelines of events and highlighting deviations from normal behavior. This automation accelerates the investigation process and helps security teams quickly identify and address the root cause of an incident.‍
• User-Friendly Interface: Mitiga's intuitive interface provides healthcare organizations with a clear and comprehensive view of their security posture. The platform presents incident details, impact assessments, and recommended remediation measures in a simple, easy-to-understand format.‍
• 24/7 monitoring of alerts: Mitiga’s threat detection engine is running 24/7, highlighting risks as they are observed, those are being investigated and verified by a human investigator to escalate only the alerts that require immediate attention, bringing the security teams only when absolutely needed to handle a breach before the blast radius increase.

For an industry with lives at stake, early detection of advanced threats is paramount. A holistic and multi-environment approach to behavioral detections enhances healthcare security as adoption of cloud and SaaS accelerates.