As autumn brings cooler weather, healthcare centers often see increased traffic for the remainder of the year. While some of the uptick in patient loads is due to the approaching cold and flu seasons, it’s also a result of the calendar year’s financial dynamics. Many people with health insurance have met their deductibles by this point, which reduces their out-of-pocket costs for additional care. As a result, fall and winter become prime times to schedule elective procedures, checkups, preventive screenings, and specialty appointments before deductibles reset in January and expenses rise again.
Meanwhile, another countdown clock is ticking. Those with Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) or Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) face a “use it or lose it” deadline. Unused balances evaporate at year’s end, creating a powerful incentive to schedule multiple care options before December 31st. In addition, some healthcare organizations and payers focus end-of-year efforts to “close care gaps” before reporting periods end. This 4th quarter surge is well documented, and many healthcare organizations even apply marketing strategies targeted to get their share of the end-of-year-rush.
Why Cybersecurity Risks Rise During Peak Seasons
Unfortunately, healthcare providers aren’t the only ones who understand these seasonal patterns. Experienced cybercriminals do too, and they deliberately time their attacks to exploit the year-end chaos because they know that end-of-year patient surge creates a perfect attack surface for multiple reasons:
- Overworked staff have less time for cybersecurity vigilance and may take shortcuts such as bypassing multi-factor authentication (MFA) prompts or failing to report anomalies because they don’t have time to deal with non-patient issues.
- Fatigued or distracted staff members are more likely to fall for phishing attacks and click malicious links or infected attachments.
- With limited IT resources diverted to support clinical operations, routine maintenance like software patches falls behind.
- Healthcare business leaders are more prone to pay extortion demands for a ransomware attack that is strategically timed during increased patient activity.
- To handle patient surges, facilities may rush to onboard temporary contracted staff, deploy additional IoT medical devices, and spin up cloud services without proper security vetting or network segmentation.
As phishing attacks continue to be a primary delivery mechanism for attacks, your organization should prepare for a surge in phishing emails disguised as insurance renewal notices, deductible reminders, billing updates, or benefits enrollment deadlines.
Don’t Delay Preventive Measures
Just as your patients aren’t delaying their desired medical services until next year, healthcare providers need to make sure they take the necessary precautions and security measures right now before patient loads peak. Like other strategies you may implement for the coming patient surge, you should conduct a cybersecurity initiative as well. Think of it as a vehicle maintenance check before a long road trip to make sure your automobile is ready for the coming endeavor. Some of the measures you should take now include:
- Engage an external security provider to conduct a pen test or risk assessment to identify vulnerabilities before real attackers do.
- Conduct targeted training sessions that focus on year-end phishing tactics using a variety of simulated phishing exercises, email reminders, and staff meeting discussions to reinforce vigilance.
- Increase your responsive readiness by reviewing and validating your incident response to ensure absolute readiness for the most probable scenarios. Ensure every team member knows their specific role, responsibilities, and communication protocols when seconds count.
- Verify your backups with proper testing to ensure your data recovery systems are ready for increased ransomware activity. Test recovery time objectives to ensure you can restore critical systems within acceptable timeframes when patient care depends on it.
- Increase your log monitoring efforts to identify anomalies that could indicate suspicious activity. Watch for red flags like multiple failed login attempts, unusual after-hours access, abnormal billing transactions, unexpected data transfers, or privilege escalation attempts.
When patient demands surge, your top concern must be patient care, not remediation. Contact HALOCK Security Labs today and learn more about how to prepare for the coming end-of-year rush so that your staff can serve your patients within compliance and without incident.
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