New cybersecurity legislation to amend the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act – an analysis of H.R. 7898

Rich Curtiss, Director, Healthcare Cyber Risk Services, Coalfire

New legislation was passed by Congress and signed by the president on January 5, 2021 that amends the HITECH Act with an additional section titled: SEC. 13412. RECOGNITION OF SECURITY PRACTICES. The fundamental driver for amending HITECH is to ensure the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the constituent HHS offices (e.g., the Office for Civil Rights) take into consideration whether a covered entity or business associate is using appropriate and recognized security best practices when investigating a complaint or responding to a breach of protected health information (PHI).

The Edge of a Storm?

Andrew Barratt, Managing Director, Europe

The SolarWinds element of this breach is likely just the ‘tip of the iceberg’ as many more businesses leveraging their management tools are exposed to this compromise. Not necessarily from the nation state actor believed to have triggered it, but from the potential sell off of those points of access to criminal groups. In our investigation experience, broad compromises are often sold on the various dark web forums to organized crime groups who are more likely to target critical business assets looking for an opportunity to monetize the breach.

Deploying your first Blueprints

Doug Francis, Senior Consultant, Cloud Solutions Engineering, Coalfire

Welcome back to the fourth and final part of this Azure Blueprints series. This section covers how to use some Blueprints provided by Microsoft and how to get started writing your Blueprints for managing your Azure Governance. Specifically, we will look more closely at a FedRAMP use case.

Blueprints scopes and assignments

Doug Francis, Senior Consultant, Cloud Solutions Engineering, Coalfire

Welcome back for part three of four in our Blueprint technical series. Today we’re covering the governance and lifecycle controls of Blueprints within an Azure tenant. There is a lot of power in what Blueprints provide, and this tooling needs to be managed across multiple subscriptions or organization units. This is where Blueprint scopes come into place.

Azure Policies

Doug Francis, Senior Consultant, Cloud Solutions Engineering, Coalfire

Welcome back to Part Two of our four-part Blueprint Series. Today's post covers the use of Azure Policies within a Blueprint deployment along with ARM templates and permissions management. Azure Policies are the critical component of Azure Blueprints. Policies, like ARM Templates, are JSON documents that describe controls around Azure resources. As mentioned earlier, these can be as simple as identifying regions or resources allowed to be deployed. More in-depth capabilities include remediation of incorrect configuration issues and audit settings and configurations of Azure resources.