The Occasional Perspective - 11/4/20

The thoughts that need further debate…

The wave of cybersecurity attacks that are sweeping across American hospitals is scary AND predictable. In addition to the lack of sufficient security for many health care information technology platforms – which is a whole topic unto itself – there’s the issue of sequestered silence among the health care organizations. I am aware of multiple health care organizations across the USA that have been the victims of ransomware attacks over the last several years. The problem is that the vast majority of these attacks are held in private, not shared and held close for fear of public retribution of some sort. From my perspective, this needs to stop. There are multiple ways in which the reporting of these cybersecurity and ransomware attacks could be reported – sort of like reporting data on Covid-19 infections 😊 to the CDC – where we could do a better job of identifying who the perpetrators are, how they were able to infiltrate the systems, and what could be done to mitigate the problem. It would be a sensible approach. Privacy and confidentiality could be maintained as it done for lots and lots and LOTS of other activities for many different industries. A common repository of learning would markedly accelerate our ability to solve the problem and protect the public.

Now, about those state and local election voting systems…Hmmm…