The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has launched an initiative to better organize and equip its healthcare cybersecurity programs through a one-stop shop.
This latter resource was created through the HHS Administration’s Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), which guides the United States during disasters and public health emergencies related to health and medical preparedness.
This initiative comes after a branch of United Healthcare was targeted BlackCat ransomware group in February, causing days of outages and chaos along the entire healthcare supply chain. The cyber attack was considered one of the most serious of its kind in the healthcare sector and led to United paying the ransom demanded by the threat actors.
The incident prompted a letter from Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.). He asked HHS what measures it was taking to prevent a similar catastrophe from happening again. ASPR said it will create new cybersecurity strategies for the healthcare industry and educate healthcare entities on best practices and resources.
“There are too many cybersecurity doors when interacting with the federal government in general, let alone HHS,” said Brian Mazanec, deputy director of ASPR’s Office of Preparedness, in a statement. “Within HHS, there are a lot of different players. So now we’re in the process of really establishing this gateway through ASPR to all those resources.”