Nationally, a growing number of healthcare providers, hospitals, and health plans have experienced security breaches. Ransomware attacks have also emerged where cyber attackers are able to compromise an organization’s computers and servers, encrypt the information, and then withhold it until the organization pays the attackers a fee.
The California Telehealth Network (CTN) www.caltelehealth.org, the State’s partnership for telehealth and telemedicine now provides cybersecurity intrusion alert services for CTN clinics and hospitals. The intrusion alert services monitors the entire statewide network for suspicious activity and provides alerts to CTN network engineers.
“We realized long ago that our safety net hospitals and clinics need protection from the growing number of cyber-attacks, said, Dan Kurywchak, Chief Technology Officer for CTN. “We proactively decided to provide intrusion alert services at no charge to the clinics and hospitals on our core MPLS network. Sites can upgrade to more advanced cyber security services as well as to CTN’s HIPAA compliant onsite security monitoring and alerting services based on their needs and budgets.
CTN began providing this service to their network of clinics and hospitals last year to address the increasing cybersecurity protection needed by the global online community. So far, CTN has detected and diverted over 12 million cyber-attack attempts on participating CTN sites.