December 18, 2023 at 10:09AM
CISA conducted a cybersecurity assessment for a healthcare and public health organization, finding no significant exploitable conditions but identifying weak passwords and other security issues. CISA is sharing the results with the sector to improve cybersecurity posture. The report includes mitigation recommendations and urges organizations to review and apply them.
Based on the meeting notes, the key takeaways are:
– The US cybersecurity agency CISA conducted a cybersecurity assessment for an undisclosed healthcare and public health sector organization using on-prem software.
– The assessment included a two-week penetration test and reviewed the organization’s web applications, susceptibility to phishing, resilience to simulated adversary attacks, databases for misconfigurations, and network and connected devices for vulnerabilities. The assessment results are being released to aid other organizations in improving their cybersecurity posture.
– CISA did not identify any significant or exploitable conditions from penetration or web application testing and noted that phishing attempts were unsuccessful due to blocked payloads.
– Although employees fell for phishing email lures, their login information only provided limited access to external-facing resources due to multi-factor authentication (MFA) implementation for cloud accounts.
– The internal penetration testing phase revealed misconfigurations, weak passwords, and other issues that could have allowed an attacker to compromise the organization’s domains. CISA identified high-severity and medium-severity issues that need addressing, including weak passwords, unnecessary network services, and insecure file shares.
– As part of its assessment report, CISA provided mitigation recommendations and urged healthcare and public health organizations to review and apply them to mitigate the identified issues.
The CISA assessment report also includes a series of mitigation recommendations and strategies that healthcare and public health organizations can implement to mitigate cyber threats.
For more details or specific information, feel free to ask.