The healthcare industry is the most impacted by data breaches, according to IBM’s 2024 Cost of Data Breach report. But why? A cybersecurity risk assessment would point to sensitive patient health records and outdated legacy systems with poor connectivity.
Recently, the industry has worked to modernize by adopting cloud technologies and containerized applications. But this comes with its own challenges, like Kubernetes security.
In this article, we’ll cover modern cybersecurity challenges in the healthcare industry, the specific risks facing Kubernetes environments, and why comprehensive cloud security is the best way to protect patient data.
The State of Cybersecurity in Healthcare
Current cybersecurity endeavors in healthcare aren’t keeping pace with the rate of attacks.
Between March 2023 and March 2024, 633 data breaches were reported to the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights. Ransomware incidents are growing in number, impacting data and costing companies millions in paying the ransom, paying the regulatory fines, and/or paying out class action lawsuits for failing to protect patient data.
The goal of healthcare cloud modernization is to allow patients and providers access to records from anywhere, transferring between providers easily. Patients are looking for the same modern, easy-to-use applications from their healthcare providers as anything else they access on the internet. Meanwhile, healthcare organizations have began adopting the cloud for the sake of efficiency, often without establishing comprehensive cloud security.
In their rush to deliver this experience, healthcare providers may not have focused on security at the center of development, which has far-reaching impacts. Cybersecurity in healthcare should be at the forefront of all technological advancement to protect both patient data and healthcare organizations.
Regulatory Compliance & Pressure
Regulatory pressure is increasing. HIPAA already provides guidelines for protecting sensitive healthcare data, and can fine organizations for breaches. HITECH strengthens HIPAA’s enforcement, incentivizing providers to adopt and use electronic health records (EHRs) and health information technology. This is what pushed many healthcare providers towards cloud adoption to govern and administrate EHRs.
However, cloud adoption at this scale has amplified both opportunity and risk. It’s easier for patients and providers to access health records from other clinics. But poor security controls on cloud servers and Kubernetes containers gives attackers easy access to this confidential information, enabling them to perform other attacks (like fraud) down the line.
Kubernetes in Healthcare – Opportunities and Risks
Kubernetes, a container orchestration platform, enables modern apps to scale and interconnect, allowing for easy cloud connectivity. Kubernetes operates in the middle of several cloud resources to bridge applications, infrastructure, and development pipelines. Because healthcare innovation, particularly in response to HIPAA and HITECH, is focused on providing patients access to electronic health records, those records need to be available in the cloud. This comes with a few key struggles:
- Managing huge, fluctuating volumes of data, including patient data, lab results, imaging, etc.
- Protecting data from unauthorized access and breaches to maintain compliance with regulations like HIPAA.
- Securely sharing patient data across organizations.
Kubernetes helps address these challenges by supporting:
- Data management: Kubernetes manages and scales databases, data lakes, object stores, etc., enabling easy storage and access to large volumes of data.
- Regulatory compliance: Kubernetes can be integrated with many security tools for encryption, identity and access management, network segmentation, and more, to protect patient data.
- Data sharing: Because Kubernetes enables interconnectivity, data is easy to share between a variety of different applications, services, and organizations.
- App modernization: As a widely adopted tool, Kubernetes allows for easy integration with modern technologies (such as machine learning) to help healthcare organizations deliver innovative solutions and applications.
However, Kubernetes is complex and comes with its own security challenges that, if unaddressed, will fail to protect private patient data.
Misconfigurations
The default settings in Kubernetes are overly permissive, making cluster misconfigurations a significant threat. Often, public dashboards are exposed, and administrator privileges are granted too freely. This allows cyber attackers to gather tons of data from a single Kubernetes vulnerability, because once they’re in, they have the permissions and freedoms to wreak havoc.
Exposed APIs and Control Planes
Protecting the Kubernetes API and control planes (includes the API server, Cloud Controller Manager, Scheduler, etcd datastore, and Kubelet processes on each Node) requires strong network policies. If the API server is exposed or misconfigured, which is easy to do considering it’s needed for literally every area you want Kubernetes to connect with another resource or tool, attackers could gain full cluster control.
Insecure Container Images
Container images are a vital part of your Kubernetes builds and should be properly secured against threats. Failing to protect and scan your containers, clusters, and pods for vulnerabilities can lead to shipping containers with malware, outdated libraries, rootkits, crypto miners, etc.
What are the stakes?
Kubernetes organizes data and cloud resources, operating as a critical control point in your infrastructure. Failing to secure your Kubernetes containers, pods, and clusters leaves your organization vulnerable to cyber threats like unauthorized access, credential theft, malware injection, and data breaches. Even a minor breach, like a weak password on one overprivileged account, could expose massive volumes of patient data to be stolen and misused.
Enforce strong Kubernetes security policies to keep your organization, including any apps and services downstream of your Kubernetes containers, protected against threat actors.
The Need for Comprehensive Cloud Security
Patient data often includes some of the most sensitive personally identifiable information in someone’s life. That data should be accessible to people and their healthcare providers and, above all, well-protected. Piecemeal security leaves behind too many gaps, particularly when dealing with Kubernetes and multiple interconnected cloud tools, and attackers can steal large amounts of data from even a minor opening.
Performing a cybersecurity risk assessment can identify the most likely threats to your organization, so you can mitigate or form strategies to handle them proactively. This is the first step in strengthening cloud security.
Comprehensive cloud security focuses on eliminating any gaps in protection across your cloud infrastructure, replacing piecemeal protection with a unified defense. This defense is formed from a few core elements: identity and access management (IAM), container security and runtime protection, data encryption in transit and at rest, and continuous monitoring and incident response readiness. We also recommend one additional element: integrating Kubernetes security into the broader cloud security strategy.
Identity and Access Management
IAM verifies who is accessing a resource and what permissions they have, and includes terminating former users’ access. It involves secure authentication measures and procedures for granting and revoking access to resources. With complex cloud infrastructure, this can be a challenge.
Container Security and Runtime Protection
Container security and runtime protection stop threats to your containers from creation to destruction. Secure your containers by only using trusted repositories and third-party tools, implementing continuous scanning to identify vulnerabilities at every stage of development and during runtime, and automating as much monitoring as possible to eliminate scalability issues and human error.
Data Encryption in Transit and At Rest
Encryption is the best way to protect sensitive information in the event it’s accessed by an unauthorized party. Use personalized keys to encrypt data, limit how and where it can be shared, and ensure encryption protocols are followed.
Continuous Monitoring and Incident Response Readiness
Look for security threats in real time, at all times. Continuously monitor your cloud resources by collecting logs, analyzing them, and alerting security teams when a potential threat is identified. Security teams should be ready to respond to incidents immediately, with effective action plans formed during a cybersecurity risk assessment.
Integrated Kubernetes Security
Kubernetes orchestrates your containers in the cloud, and needs to be protected as a vital part of your cloud infrastructure. Securing your Kubernetes environment will help protect data against unauthorized access and prevent data breaches.
Defending healthcare organizations
Patients trust their healthcare organizations with sensitive data directly related to their health and well-being. Securing healthcare cloud environments is critical to protecting patient trust and maintaining compliance with regulations like HIPAA. Kubernetes security is a vital part of your holistic cloud cybersecurity program, and should be combined with IAM, container runtime security, data encryption, and monitoring to protect your organization’s data.
Safeguard patient data with more than piecemeal protection. Review your cloud and Kubernetes security posture now—before attackers find a way in.
