Healthcare security: Combating threats with zero trust – News

Healthcare systems are under attack by cyber threat actors, and it does not appear that there will be relief anytime soon. Nearly 400 healthcare cyberattacks were reported through the first three quarters of 2024 and over 1.2 million patients were affected by data breaches in February of this year alone.

Against this threat backdrop, healthcare organizations such as Main Line Health are relying on technology partners within the cybersecurity community, such as Elisity Inc., to lessen the impact of breaches and protect critical systems.

“There’s a lot of pressure — threat actors are becoming more vicious, targeting health systems in particular, as well as other critical infrastructure,” said Aaron Weismann (pictured, left), chief information security officer at Main Line Health. “They’re doing so because regulatory breaches and patient dignity impacts are revenue drivers for them. Fortunately, our tooling has become more sophisticated. We partner with more vendors who are able to deliver parts of infrastructure that are able to help us reduce the blast radius of an attack, which is absolutely critical to keep patient care going.”

Weismann spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier at the RSAC 2025 Conference, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, News Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by James Winebrenner (right), chief executive officer of Elisity, and they discussed challenges and solutions for protecting the healthcare industry. (* Disclosure below.)

Least privilege access for healthcare

For technology companies such as Elisity, part of the challenge in working with healthcare organizations to secure systems is that patient care environments can be very complex. Along with managed desktop, laptop and wireless devices, there is a significant amount of IoT connectivity.

“It’s being able to identify those different classes of systems and then be able to not just segment them for segmentation’s sake, but really move them towards a true least privilege access model,” Winebrenner said. “Does the MRI machine need to talk to the IP video camera that’s on the fifth floor? The answer is no … it needs to be able to talk to the patient monitoring system.”

To deal with this level of complexity in healthcare environments, Elisity focuses on providing visibility into a tangled web of connected devices and crafting policies for least privilege access and zero trust. This allows organizations such as Main Line Health to make informed decisions around device segmentation while maintaining the right context for effective patient care.

“We built a software-defined control plane that we can extend out into existing infrastructure, gather metadata about what’s communicating, marry that up with other sources of identity and context that are in the customer’s environment,” Winebrenner said. “We give customers a holistic view of all of those assets and then allow them to build policy based on the identity and context, not the underlying network construct.”

Both Weismann and Winebrenner have come to appreciate the importance of delivering technology solutions in patient healthcare today. Clinical operations staff want to be involved because they understand the vital role that cybersecurity can play in the ongoing delivery of patient care.

“One of the biggest takeaways is that clinical operations actually loves helping technology design,” Weismann said. “It turns out they care very greatly about the technology support on their patient care. If you start introducing these concepts and communicating in a clinically relevant way, you’re going to be able to get really solid buy-in from your clinical operators. That’s transferable to any industry.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of News’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the RSAC 2025 Conference event:

(* Disclosure: Elisity Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Elisity nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or News.)

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