Funding, awareness and threat information sharing are crucial for the health and safety of all, says Health-ISAC CSO.
To discuss this further, SIGNAL Media spoke with Errol Weiss, chief security officer (CSO) at the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center, commonly referred to as Health-ISAC.
“Between Change Healthcare and then Ascension Hospital systems, one of the root causes in both of those incidents were lack of MFA on remote accounts,” he stated. Weiss spoke on key areas users should prioritize to safeguard their systems—MFA was one of the four he listed. In addition to the crucial need for MFA for remote access, Weiss mentioned the importance of regular audits to upkeep MFA for all employees, especially those with privileged access to data. Many successful attacks can be traced to a lack of policy implementation, he said.
Referring to the recently published 2025 Health Sector Cyber Threat Landscape report, Weiss also spoke on ransomware attacks. All critical systems and data must be backed up, he said. “More importantly, it’s making sure that those backups work as intended,” Weiss suggested. “Let’s practice full restoration; let’s build a brand-new system from the ground up and make sure we can restore it, restore all the data and be back up and running as quickly as possible.”
A common mistake, Weiss mentioned, is organizations believing their backup is running until an urgent call for a backup that fails to operate.
The Health-ISAC CSO also spoke on the importance of threat information sharing. “I’m a big proponent of information sharing and collaboration being a way for organizations to better protect themselves, but also as a way for the individual to learn and be able to get information about what other organizations have implemented in terms of best practices,” Weiss said. These regular discussions on data loss prevention policies, suggestions for chief information security officers (CISOs), etc., help organizations prevent future threats.
For a global organization like Health-ISAC, which has a membership community of about 1,000 institutions in more than 140 countries—hospitals, medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies, health information technology companies, university health systems, insurance companies—this type of information sharing is crucial for a highly vulnerable sector.
Read the full article in The Cyber Edge by Signal. Click Here
