News Feature | October 28, 2015

Atlantic Health System Completes Proactive Phishing Risk Assessment

Christine Kern

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Seton Health Breached Through Email Phishing Scam

New Jersey non-profit healthcare system takes steps to address heightened cyber threats.

As healthcare targets become increasingly vulnerable to cybercriminals, one healthcare system is taking steps to heighten its efforts to fend off phishing attacks and other cyber threats. Atlantic Health System, one of the largest non-profit health care organizations in New Jersey, has expanded its security services engagement with CynergisTek, completing CynergisTek’s Phishing Assessment program to evaluate its overall susceptibility to phishing attacks using realistic scenarios and comprehensive perimeter evaluations that identify areas of vulnerability.

The organization then used findings from the exercise to establish a baseline understanding of its workforce’s ability to identify suspicious emails and valuable insight into vulnerable they were to phishing attempts. CynergisTek leveraged the results of the assessment to provide actionable insights and timely staff education to aid Atlantic Health in maintaining the integrity of its protected information assets.

Atlantic Health also relies on CynergisTek’s Compliance Assist Partner Program (CAPP) which provides ongoing technical testing and executive reviews of its privacy and security processes. With 1,599 licensed beds, more than 14,000 employees and more than 4,000 physicians, Atlantic Health has a vast network to oversee, and therefore cyber security is of the utmost importance.

“CynergisTek provides periodic evaluations of our systems and expert advice to keep us on pace with evolving security threats and priorities, like cybersecurity,” said Larry G. Pierce, Manager of Information Security and Enterprise Management at Atlantic Health System. “The assessment was invaluable in terms of gleaning solid metrics regarding our personnel and raising awareness of pertinent threats. Now, we are better equipped to identify, respond and better educate our workforce to a phishing campaign targeting our organization.”

“Phishing has become one of the top security threats to healthcare, and the industry is simply not prepared for the kind of attacks we have been seeing,” said Dr. Michael Mathews, COO of CynergisTek.