How Asset Discovery Can Prevent Healthcare Breaches

Modern healthcare organizations are deeply technical, relying on the latest applications and hardware to deliver the best patient care. While these tools streamline managing patient data, delivering services, and providing support operations, they also open pathways to cybercriminals’ attacks if they are not properly secured. However, they can only be secured if organizations know they exist on the network. It can be challenging when you consider how immense many healthcare organizations are with thousands of simultaneously active users.

Many organizations attempt to use discovery tools to find all of these technologies connected to the network. These tools scan for connected devices and applications in use, hoping to map out a complete inventory. While their effectiveness varies, their most important aspect for healthcare beyond actually finding technologies is that they do not disrupt patient care and operational continuity. Of course, this challenges organizations’ ability to manage their attack surface while maintaining operations.

Before understanding how discovery tools work, it’s important to understand what an attack surface is. The attack surface is simply all of the possible points where unauthorized users can enter data or extract data from an environment. This can be quite large for a healthcare organization, including components such as APIs, web applications, and servers for the most common assets but extending into the cloud, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and mobile technologies.

The broader and more complex the network—especially in sectors like Healthtech—the more extensive the attack surface becomes, increasing the potential entry points for attackers and multiplying the challenges in securing them.

Organizations that fail to identify all aspects of their attack surface are like high-security facilities that leave their doors unlocked. They have no way of knowing if anyone has been in and what they might have done if they had. In the case of healthcare, unmonitored attack surfaces may range from data theft and operational disruption to severe regulatory penalties.

The healthcare sector has a history of organizations breached due to not detecting and monitoring every asset on their network. Community Health Systems and Banner Health were two victims who suffered major and costly breaches from such a lapse in management.

Community Health Systems was the victim of a cyberattack due to unpatched vulnerabilities in its network equipment, which led to the theft of personal information from approximately 4.5 million patients. Similarly, Banner Health suffered a significant breach that affected up to 3.7 million individuals when attackers exploited weaknesses in a payment processing system used in food and beverage outlets. These breaches could have been avoided had all assets been detected and appropriately managed.

From this, the obvious question is, how do healthcare organizations avoid becoming victims in this manner? The answer is asset discovery. With asset discovery, organizations systematically identify all assets connected to their network, especially those that are externally facing. The goal is to create a comprehensive inventory of these assets, allowing IT and security teams to proactively evaluate their risk and apply appropriate mitigations such as security patches or scoping access controls.

This job can be especially challenging for healthcare organizations due to the sprawling digital landscapes. These organizations may reside across multiple states or locations, making it hard to detect when new technologies are added. This is made all the harder by APIs, cloud services, and SaaS applications extending traditional boundaries to create vast and complex networks that are difficult to oversee and protect. These expanded attack surfaces can expose sensitive health data and critical systems to cyber threats, making traditional security methods less effective.

Further complicating this is the ease with which different groups can add new technologies, often with nothing more than a credit card. While the addition is often based on business needs, it creates Shadow IT, which are technologies deployed outside the IT department. These assets increase the organizational attack surface, and because they are unmonitored and unsupported, they provide easy entry points for cyber threats.

Asset discovery tools have had to evolve from manual inventories and basic scanning to address this new complex IT environment. They have grown to more sophisticated, automated solutions that continuously monitor and analyze assets in real time. Optimal tools go beyond just asset detection and include identifying vulnerabilities and in-depth asset data. Legacy tooling that did this in the past was quite invasive and could impede performance. Newer tools are now designed to be minimally intrusive, allowing businesses to proceed without the risk of disrupting operations.

Asset discovery is a foundation for securing any network by minimizing blind spots in the security landscape. These blind spots are often the unseen, unmanaged, or forgotten elements within an organization’s IT environment—areas where attackers are likely to strike. By ensuring that all known and previously undiscovered assets are accounted for and monitored, comprehensive asset discovery deters potential attackers by closing off these vulnerabilities. When attackers find fewer vulnerabilities to exploit, the likelihood of a successful breach diminishes significantly.

A detailed understanding of all assets within an organization is vital for effective vulnerability management. Asset discovery ensures that every component of the IT environment, from legacy systems to newly deployed cloud services, is identified and cataloged. This enables security teams to implement a regular and systematic monitoring and patching schedule, ensuring that all network parts are protected against known vulnerabilities.

Asset discovery is also intrinsically linked to regulatory compliance. These tools help organizations protect patient data, which is vital for maintaining compliance with healthcare’s strict regulatory requirements. Organizations using non-intrusive asset discovery tools help ensure that no part of their network where patient data is stored, processed, or transmitted is overlooked. By maintaining an accurate and up-to-date asset inventory, healthcare organizations can ensure IT assets are secured, helping them better comply with these regulations and reduce the risk of a breach.

Probely is more than just security testing. It is also a non-intrusive asset discovery tool that seamlessly integrates into existing IT systems. Probely leverages sophisticated scanning technologies that quietly work in the background, ensuring normal operations remain unaffected. This is especially important for healthcare organizations, where even minor interruptions can cause major repercussions. By employing such discreet yet effective techniques, Probely ensures that organizations can continually monitor and secure their assets without compromising operational efficacy or security.

A key focus of Probely’s asset discovery is the identification of an organization’s public-facing digital attack surface. These assets, which include public APIs, web applications, and online services, represent critical points of vulnerability as they are directly accessible from the internet. Probely uses advanced algorithms to scan and catalog these assets, ensuring that every potential cyberattack entry point is accounted for and secured.

Probely excels in detecting unknown and shadow IT components—assets often missed by traditional security measures due to their unofficial or unmonitored nature. By bringing these hidden elements into light, Probely provides a more complete and accurate picture of the attack surface, enabling organizations to enact more comprehensive security measures and reduce the overall risk of breaches.

Schedule a demo today to see how Probely can help your organization uncover its true software security posture.