The Hidden Costs of False Positives in Healthtech Security

When we talk about healthcare today, it’s impossible not to consider application security or AppSec. As healthcare providers increasingly lean on digital solutions to deliver patient care, they are creating an explosion of healthcare data requiring protection to ensure its confidentiality, integrity and availability. It’s not just about keeping the information safe on a server somewhere; it’s about ensuring that every interaction and every data transfer upholds the highest standards of security while still delivering top-tier patient care.

Healthcare has some unique challenges as a sector, though. Modern providers use a vast network of interconnected devices and systems—from electronic health records and diagnostic tools to integrated care management platforms. Each connection point in this complex ecosystem potentially opens up a new vulnerability.

To add a twist to this already challenging situation, cybercriminals are constantly improving their game, adopting cutting-edge technologies like AI, telemedicine, and mobile health apps. The stakes of operation are incredibly high. A single system failure or data breach can cause financial and reputational damage, directly impacting patient care and safety.

To address the challenge of securely delivering technological services, teams employ a wide range of tools, gathering large volumes of information. This information is ingested and processed by security teams. Still, in this process, there is always the possibility that a benign action gets flagged as a threat, creating a false positive. This misidentification kicks off a security investigation, consumes valuable resources, and diverts attention away from actual security threats, potentially compromising the overall security posture. In environments where developer resources are already stretched thin, such as health, the additional burden of addressing numerous false positives can severely impact productivity.

False positives in security systems are more than an annoyance; they represent a significant drain on resources, with profound implications for morale and the financial well-being of health tech organizations.

Chasing false positives is a resource-intensive task that consumes the time and attention of developers and security teams. Teams must investigate each false alert to ensure it does not represent a genuine threat, diverting effort from real security issues and development tasks. This diversion can delay critical updates and the implementation of security measures that are actually needed, thereby increasing the vulnerability of health tech systems to actual cyber threats.

The frequent occurrence of false positives can lead to significant tensions between developers and security teams, which can often result in reduced productivity as teams spend more time debunking false alarms than focusing on their core development and security tasks. Over time, the continual interruption caused by false positives can lead to alert fatigue, where staff become desensitized to notifications from the security system. This desensitization increases the risk of overlooking genuine security threats, potentially leading to undetected breaches that could have severe consequences for patient privacy and safety.

The wasted time investigating false positives is made even worse by the staffing shortages faced by health tech. Almost half of healthcare organizations admit to facing staffing shortages in IT. With insufficient personnel to handle all security tasks effectively, allocating the available human resources judiciously becomes crucial.

False positives, however, complicate this allocation. They create unnecessary work, forcing skilled security professionals to spend time verifying and dismissing alerts that pose no real threat rather than focusing on genuine vulnerabilities and other productive tasks.

These staffing challenges are made all the more complex, with the need for security professionals in this sector to be adept in technical cybersecurity measures and understand the regulatory landscape, such as HIPAA compliance, that governs the industry. This dual requirement makes their time particularly valuable. False positives divert these highly skilled professionals from applying their specialized knowledge to areas where they could make a significant impact, such as enhancing data protection measures or developing new ways to secure patient data against emerging threats.

Employing advanced strategies and tools is crucial to mitigate the challenge of false positives in health tech security. Reducing false positives requires enhanced context-aware scanning tools, allowing them to understand the specific operational context of health tech applications. This significantly reduces the likelihood of flagging benign activities as threats.

Security environments and threat landscapes continually evolve, rendering previously effective tools less efficient over time. Regular updates and fine-tuning are required to ensure these tools remain most continuously effective. Regularly updated tools are less likely to produce false positives, as they are tuned to recognize and adapt to the latest secure programming practices and compliance requirements.

Implementing effective solutions in health tech to reduce false positives involves integrating robust security measures right from the start of the development lifecycle, an approach known as DevSecOps. This method ensures that security is not an afterthought but a fundamental aspect of the development process, helping to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities early.

AI and machine learning technologies can also play a role in enhancing these efforts by analyzing vast amounts of data to detect patterns and anomalies that might be missed by human eyes. AI systems can learn to distinguish between genuine threats and benign anomalies over time, thereby refining false positive rates and significantly improving detection accuracy. With these advanced tools, health tech organizations can ensure their applications are effective and secure, maintaining users’ trust and protecting sensitive data.

Probely helps health tech organizations fortify their applications against cyber threats. It integrates security testing within the development lifecycle, aligning perfectly with DevSecOps principles. This integration ensures that security is not just an add-on but a fundamental aspect from the earliest stages of development, leading to more thorough and efficient testing processes.

Moreover, Probely understands that the landscape of cyber threats is constantly evolving. To keep pace, we regularly update our security testing tool to adapt to the latest security vulnerabilities and threats. This proactive approach helps maintain the relevance of our testing processes and significantly reduces false positives, thus enhancing the overall efficiency of your security operations.

Additionally, Probely’s support for automated and continuous security testing within CI/CD pipelines is crucial for any health tech organization looking to maintain low false positive rates and high accuracy in our security testing. This continuous capability ensures that your applications are continuously tested against the latest threats in real-time, enabling quick adaptations to changes and safeguarding your critical health data effectively.

Try a demo today to see why you’re not just implementing a security solution; you’re integrating a continuous, up-to-date defense mechanism directly into your development workflow.