A website in the healthcare industry being attacked? I've seen it happen too many times. Last month, a private hospital's reservation system was paralyzed by DDoS, patients could not even brush out the registration page, the hospital was so anxious. This medical data thing, once the accident is not a simple business interruption - patient privacy leakage, compliance red line stepped on the mine, the collapse of the reputation of the organization, which is not a joke.
Why do hackers always target healthcare systems? The reason is very simple: the high value of data and weak defense. Medical records can be sold on the black market to sky-high prices, and many health care organizations are still using the old-fashioned security program, thinking that the set of a basic CDN will be able to rest assured. Don't be naive, regular CDNs are like paper walls in front of targeted CC attacks, not to mention the deadly compliance requirements of HIPAA and GDPR.
I have handled more than a dozen medical customers CDN rectification project, found that we most often step on three pits: the first is the blind pursuit of low-priced program, the results of the attack can not be carried; the second is to ignore the special encryption requirements of medical data; the third is to configure to forget to leave audit logs, something happened and even the traceability can not be done. Today, we will break open the rubbing said, how to use high-defense CDN not only to protect the security bottom line, but also in line with industry rules.
First, figure out where to focus your healthcare data protection
Medical data can be more than just the text of the medical record so simple, image files, health insurance information, real-time monitoring data must be protected. This means that your CDN must do three things: encrypt the entire transmission, static dynamic resource separation, access link traceability. Do not believe those who claim that “one key all-around protection” of the cheap program, I have tested the default configuration of a vendor, even the basic TLS 1.2 are not forced to open, the response header can also leak out the IP address of the server.
Last year, when we helped a tertiary hospital to do penetration testing, we found that its image cloud storage system was actually transmitting DICOM files via HTTP. Attackers can intercept CT images of patients by sniffing on public WiFi - if this is detected by the Health Commission, the fine can be issued to the hospital's bankruptcy. Later, we replaced the hospital with CDN07's medical nodes, forced end-to-end encryption to be enabled, and even customized the caching policy according to the image file format.
Keep an eye on these metrics for high-defense CDN selection
There are quite a few CDNs on the market that specialize in the medical industry, but not many of them can really fight. Randomly measured three typical service providers: CDN5's DDoS protection is good, but lacks medical compliance certification; 08Host's Asia-Pacific nodes have low latency, but the WAF rule base does not cover enough medical-specific vulnerabilities (e.g., FHIR interface injections); and finally CDN07, which we focused on testing, instead has the best overall performance, not only passing HIPAA and HITRUST certification, but also being able to provide customized cache cleaning strategies.
This is an example of the key configuration we did on CDN07:
Notice that last bit of parameter filtering - many healthcare systems will inadvertently expose patient IDs in the URL, which is tantamount to giving head to the crawlers. We use regular expressions to directly erase sensitive parameters, pinching off the risk of leakage at the source.
WAF rules have to be customized for healthcare scenarios
Generic WAF rules simply don't protect against healthcare industry-specific attacks. For example, hackers will fake FHIR API query requests to pull medical records in bulk, or upload malicious files through the DICOM gateway of the PACS system. We deployed this set of customized rules on CDN07:
A special note of caution, don't copy these rules directly! The business logic of each medical system is different, I recommend running in learning mode for two weeks, and then turn on blocking after the WAF is familiar with normal traffic patterns. There was once a hospital that directly turned on strict mode and blocked all the requests from radiologists to upload images - the reason was that the rules didn't adapt to their PACS workstation whitelist.
Compliance isn't just about sticking a certification on it.
I've seen too many organizations that thought they could pass an audit by buying a “compliant CDN”, only to be investigated all over the place. The real compliance needs to run through the entire data life cycle: TLS 1.3 encryption for transmission, anonymization for storage, and logging for at least 6 years without tampering. CDN07 has done a good job in this regard, automatically generating transmission encryption proof reports, and providing watermarking of compliance logs.
This is our audit log configuration template:
Notice the last two custom fields: Patient-ID is used to track data access associated to a specific patient, and the Encryption field records the encryption protocol used for each request. This configuration has helped three of our clients to successfully pass the Healthcare Commission's flight inspection.
Hidden tricks in the real world
Share two experiences that textbooks won't write about: the first is the smart use of bandwidth scheduling policies. The medical industry has obvious access peaks (for example, 9 a.m. booking peak), we configured a dynamic bandwidth expansion strategy on CDN07, which automatically triggers the protection plan when it detects a sudden increase in traffic of 50%, which saves money and protects against sudden traffic attacks.
The second is to fake 404 pages to catch hackers. We deployed a 404 page disguised as a database error report in the management backend portal, which triggers an alert whenever someone accesses it:
Last month, this trap caught an attack group trying to infiltrate the HIS system - they saw the fake page “database connection failure” and thought it was really successful, but in fact it had already triggered the traceability alarm.
A final word of caution.
What's the biggest fear in this whole medical safety thing? Fear of fluke mentality. There are always people who feel that “we are small hospitals, no one stares at” “data is not worth money”, until the patient held up the privacy leakage of the indictment on the door on the silly eyes. Now the means of attack has been upgraded, hackers will use low-flow CC attacks slowly consume your resources, picking two o'clock in the morning health insurance settlement time outbreak.
Sincerely advise you: at least do a complete penetration test, focusing on checking the CDN configuration blind spot. Look at your static resource cache has not been mixed into sensitive data, check the API interface has not exposed the patient ID, verify that the WAF can not recognize the forged Health Commission red-top file attack - these days even the CDN have to “prevent teammates”, some of the The misuse of insiders is more harmful than hackers.
Technology solutions are tools after all, and true security stems from a reverence for medical data. The configuration of the most advanced CDN, if even the basic data classification and grading are not done, it is still nothing. Remember a principle: encryption can be encrypted all encrypted, can not store on the non-storage, can be traced back must be traced back. The medical industry can not afford to play security gambling, after all, who do not want their own medical reports appear on the darknet discount sales, right?
