Covered entities bound by law to follow HIPAA regulations – like healthcare providers, health plans, and others handling protected health information (PHI) – need to demonstrate efforts to secure PHI. The specific measures required to do so are detailed in the HIPAA security rule which states that covered entities must put controls into place to identify and protect against anticipated threats to the security and integrity of PHI.

The pandemic has touched virtually every aspect of life, and cybersecurity is no different. A new threat intelligence and cybersecurity status report from Microsoft shows how businesses around the world are changing their approach to cybersecurity to protect user data and systems as more and more teams work remotely. Here’s how the pandemic has changed cybersecurity, and what your business can do differently to protect your data as the situation evolves.

It’s estimated that more than 27 billion records were exposed in the first half of 2020, despite the decrease in number of reported breach events from 2019. This trend of data breach events is becoming more severe with the average cost and size of a data breach increasing year over year. The severity of modern data breaches presents a serious risk to companies looking to protect the data of stakeholders such as customers and employees.

Sensitive data like credentials and secrets are in constant danger of exposure, and this is especially true in the cloud. Due to the highly collaborative and always-on nature of cloud services, they tend to be environments where security best practices are hard to enforce without either lots of time and effort or automated controls.

Data exfiltration — the risk of your data ending up somewhere it doesn’t belong — remains one of the greatest data security concerns. This risk is only worsened by the fact that as companies migrate their data into the cloud, they struggle to maintain the visibility needed to ensure their data remains secure.

As of June 2020, more than 3.2 million consumer records were exposed in the 10 biggest data breaches this year. Eight of the ten largest breaches occurred at healthcare or medical organizations, meaning patient information in addition to PII was likely acquired by hackers. Data loss prevention (DLP) is an ever-changing practice, with new security policies and information security standards evolving to keep up with the threat of online hackers.

Cloud security requires long-term investments to get right. Today’s demands of remote work and collaboration across teams are forcing security leaders to make fast decisions about which business tools they should allow their orgs to adopt. Data loss prevention (DLP) is a good way to support cybersecurity policies that will safeguard sensitive data and perform at the highest levels of security over the long haul.

Many businesses that have allowed employees to continue working from home for the foreseeable future are aware that they need to update their cybersecurity. It’s likely that they have allocated some budget and IT resources to make those necessary changes. However, IT budgets are finite. Given the economic disruption of the pandemic, enterprises must strategically decide where to invest their cybersecurity budget most effectively.

We’re excited to announce a new feature of the Nightfall platform: the Nightfall policy engine. With the policy engine, security teams can now more granularly customize when and how PII, PHI, secrets/credentials, and other business-critical data are detected within their cloud environments. Read on to learn more about the policy engine and how you can make the most of it.

When it comes to security, practitioners have to keep a lot they need to keep top of mind. The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model provides the fundamentals needed to organize both technical issues and threats within a networking stack. Although information security is shifting to a cloud-first world, the OSI model still continues to prove its relevance. We’ll cover four key reasons why the OSI model still matters and how you can operationalize it in today’s world.