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Fitness trackers worn on the wrist, glucose monitors that test blood sugar without a prick, and connected toothbrushes that let you know when you’ve missed a spot—welcome to internet-connected healthcare. It’s a new realm of care with breakthroughs big and small. Some you’ll find in your home, some you’ll find inside your doctor’s office, yet all of them are connected. Which means they all need to be protected. After all, they’re not tracking any old data. They’re tracking our health data, one of the most precious things we own.
Internet-connected healthcare, also known as connected medicine, is a broad topic. On the consumer side, it covers everything from smart watches that track health data to wireless blood pressure monitors that you can use at home. On the practitioner side, it accounts for technologies ranging from electronic patient records, network-enabled diagnostic devices, remote patient monitoring in the form of wearable devices, apps for therapy, and even small cameras that can be swallowed in the form of a pill to get a view of a patient’s digestive system.
Additionally, it also includes telemedicine visits, where you can get a medical issue diagnosed and treated remotely via your smartphone or computer by way of a video conference or a healthcare provider’s portal—which you can read about more in one of my blogs. In all, big digital changes are taking place in healthcare—a transformation that’s rapidly taking shape to the tune of a global market expected to top USD 534.3 billion by 2025.
Advances in digital healthcare have come more slowly compared to other aspects of our lives, such as consumer devices like phones and tablets. Security is a top reason why. Not only must a healthcare device go through a rigorous design and approval process to ensure it’s safe, sound, and effective, but it’s also held to similar rigorous degrees of regulation when it comes to medical data privacy. For example, in the U.S., we have the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), which sets privacy and security standards for certain health information.
Taken together, this requires additional development time for any connected medical device or solution, in addition to the time it takes to develop one with the proper efficacy. Healthcare device manufacturers cannot simply move as quickly as, say, a smartphone manufacturer can. And rightfully so.
However, for this blog, we’ll focus on the home and personal side of the equation, with devices like fitness trackers, glucose monitors, smartwatches, and wearable devices in general—connected healthcare devices that more and more of us are purchasing on our own. To be clear, while these devices may not always be categorized as healthcare devices in the strictest (and regulatory) sense, they are gathering your health data, which you should absolutely protect. Here are some straightforward steps you can take:
1) First up, protect your phone
Many medical IoT devices use a smartphone as an interface, and as a means of gathering, storing, and sharing health data. So whether you’re an Android owner or iOS owner, get security software installed on your phone so you can protect all the things it accesses and controls. Additionally, installing it will protect you and your phone in general as well.
2) Set strong, unique passwords for your medical IoT devices
Some IoT devices have found themselves open to attack because they come with a default username and password—which are often published on the internet. When you purchase any IoT device, set a fresh password using a strong method of password creation. And keep those passwords safe. Instead of keeping them in a notebook or on sticky notes, consider using a password manager.
3) Use two-factor authentication
You’ve probably come across two-factor authentication while banking, shopping, or logging into any other number of accounts. Using a combination of your username, password, and a security code sent to another device you own (typically a mobile phone) makes it tougher for hackers to crack your device. If your IoT device supports two-factor authentication, use it for extra security.
4) Update your devices regularly
This is vital. Make sure you have the latest updates so that you get the latest functionality from your device. Equally important is that updates often contain security upgrades. If you can set your device to receive automatic updates, do so.
5) Secure your internet router
Your medical IoT device will invariably use your home Wi-Fi network to connect to the internet, just like your other devices. All the data that travels on there is personal and private, and that goes double for any health data that passes along it. Make sure you use a strong and unique password. Also, change the name of your router so it doesn’t give away your address or identity. One more step is to check that your router is using an encryption method, like WPA2, which will keep your signal secure. You may also want to consider investing in an advanced internet router that has built-in protection, which can secure and monitor any device that connects to your network.
6) Use a VPN and a comprehensive security solution
Similar to the above, another way you can further protect the health data you send over the internet is to use a virtual private network, or VPN. A VPN uses an encrypted connection to send and receive data, which shields it from prying eyes. A hacker attempting to eavesdrop on your session will effectively see a mishmash of garbage data, which helps keep your health data secure.
7) When purchasing, do your research
Read up on reviews and comments about the devices you’re interested in, along with news articles about their manufacturers. See what their track record is on security, such as if they’ve exposed data or otherwise left their users open to attack.
Bottom line, when we speak of connected healthcare, we’re ultimately speaking about one of the most personal things you own: your health data. That’s what’s being collected. And that’s what’s being transmitted by your home network. Take these extra measures to protect your devices, data, and yourself as you enjoy the benefits of the connected care you bring into your life and home.
The post How to Protect Your Internet-Connected Healthcare Devices appeared first on McAfee Blog.
There are indications that U.S. healthcare giant Change Healthcare has made a $22 million extortion payment to the infamous BlackCat ransomware group (a.k.a. “ALPHV“) as the company struggles to bring services back online amid a cyberattack that has disrupted prescription drug services nationwide for weeks. However, the cybercriminal who claims to have given BlackCat access to Change’s network says the crime gang cheated them out of their share of the ransom, and that they still have the sensitive data Change reportedly paid the group to destroy. Meanwhile, the affiliate’s disclosure appears to have prompted BlackCat to cease operations entirely.
Image: Varonis.
In the third week of February, a cyber intrusion at Change Healthcare began shutting down important healthcare services as company systems were taken offline. It soon emerged that BlackCat was behind the attack, which has disrupted the delivery of prescription drugs for hospitals and pharmacies nationwide for nearly two weeks.
On March 1, a cryptocurrency address that security researchers had already mapped to BlackCat received a single transaction worth approximately $22 million. On March 3, a BlackCat affiliate posted a complaint to the exclusive Russian-language ransomware forum Ramp saying that Change Healthcare had paid a $22 million ransom for a decryption key, and to prevent four terabytes of stolen data from being published online.
The affiliate claimed BlackCat/ALPHV took the $22 million payment but never paid him his percentage of the ransom. BlackCat is known as a “ransomware-as-service” collective, meaning they rely on freelancers or affiliates to infect new networks with their ransomware. And those affiliates in turn earn commissions ranging from 60 to 90 percent of any ransom amount paid.
“But after receiving the payment ALPHV team decide to suspend our account and keep lying and delaying when we contacted ALPHV admin,” the affiliate “Notchy” wrote. “Sadly for Change Healthcare, their data [is] still with us.”
Change Healthcare has neither confirmed nor denied paying, and has responded to multiple media outlets with a similar non-denial statement — that the company is focused on its investigation and on restoring services.
Assuming Change Healthcare did pay to keep their data from being published, that strategy seems to have gone awry: Notchy said the list of affected Change Healthcare partners they’d stolen sensitive data from included Medicare and a host of other major insurance and pharmacy networks.
On the bright side, Notchy’s complaint seems to have been the final nail in the coffin for the BlackCat ransomware group, which was infiltrated by the FBI and foreign law enforcement partners in late December 2023. As part of that action, the government seized the BlackCat website and released a decryption tool to help victims recover their systems.
BlackCat responded by re-forming, and increasing affiliate commissions to as much as 90 percent. The ransomware group also declared it was formally removing any restrictions or discouragement against targeting hospitals and healthcare providers.
However, instead of responding that they would compensate and placate Notchy, a representative for BlackCat said today the group was shutting down and that it had already found a buyer for its ransomware source code.
The seizure notice now displayed on the BlackCat darknet website.
“There’s no sense in making excuses,” wrote the RAMP member “Ransom.” “Yes, we knew about the problem, and we were trying to solve it. We told the affiliate to wait. We could send you our private chat logs where we are shocked by everything that’s happening and are trying to solve the issue with the transactions by using a higher fee, but there’s no sense in doing that because we decided to fully close the project. We can officially state that we got screwed by the feds.”
BlackCat’s website now features a seizure notice from the FBI, but several researchers noted that this image seems to have been merely cut and pasted from the notice the FBI left in its December raid of BlackCat’s network. The FBI has not responded to requests for comment.
Fabian Wosar, head of ransomware research at the security firm Emsisoft, said it appears BlackCat leaders are trying to pull an “exit scam” on affiliates by withholding many ransomware payment commissions at once and shutting down the service.
“ALPHV/BlackCat did not get seized,” Wosar wrote on Twitter/X today. “They are exit scamming their affiliates. It is blatantly obvious when you check the source code of their new takedown notice.”
Dmitry Smilyanets, a researcher for the security firm Recorded Future, said BlackCat’s exit scam was especially dangerous because the affiliate still has all the stolen data, and could still demand additional payment or leak the information on his own.
“The affiliates still have this data, and they’re mad they didn’t receive this money, Smilyanets told Wired.com. “It’s a good lesson for everyone. You cannot trust criminals; their word is worth nothing.”
BlackCat’s apparent demise comes closely on the heels of the implosion of another major ransomware group — LockBit, a ransomware gang estimated to have extorted over $120 million in payments from more than 2,000 victims worldwide. On Feb. 20, LockBit’s website was seized by the FBI and the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) following a months-long infiltration of the group.
LockBit also tried to restore its reputation on the cybercrime forums by resurrecting itself at a new darknet website, and by threatening to release data from a number of major companies that were hacked by the group in the weeks and days prior to the FBI takedown.
But LockBit appears to have since lost any credibility the group may have once had. After a much-promoted attack on the government of Fulton County, Ga., for example, LockBit threatened to release Fulton County’s data unless paid a ransom by Feb. 29. But when Feb. 29 rolled around, LockBit simply deleted the entry for Fulton County from its site, along with those of several financial organizations that had previously been extorted by the group.
Fulton County held a press conference to say that it had not paid a ransom to LockBit, nor had anyone done so on their behalf, and that they were just as mystified as everyone else as to why LockBit never followed through on its threat to publish the county’s data. Experts told KrebsOnSecurity LockBit likely balked because it was bluffing, and that the FBI likely relieved them of that data in their raid.
Smilyanets’ comments are driven home in revelations first published last month by Recorded Future, which quoted an NCA official as saying LockBit never deleted the data after being paid a ransom, even though that is the only reason many of its victims paid.
“If we do not give you decrypters, or we do not delete your data after payment, then nobody will pay us in the future,” LockBit’s extortion notes typically read.
Hopefully, more companies are starting to get the memo that paying cybercrooks to delete stolen data is a losing proposition all around.
For weeks and even months now, millions of us have relied on the internet in ways we haven’t before. We’ve worked remotely on it, our children have schooled from home on it, and we’ve pushed the limits of our household bandwidth as families have streamed, gamed, and conferenced all at the same time. Something else is new—more and more of us have visited our doctors and healthcare professionals online. Needless to say, this is an entirely new experience for many. And with that, I got to thinking about seniors. What’s been their experience with telemedicine? What concerns have they had? And how can we help?
For starters, an online doctor’s visit is known as telemedicine—a way of diagnosing and treating a medical issue remotely. With telemedicine, care comes from your smartphone or computer via a video conference or a healthcare provider’s portal.
Telemedicine is not new at all. It’s been in use for some time now, such as in rural communities that have little access to local healthcare professionals, in cases of ongoing treatment like heart health monitoring and diabetes care, and in situations where a visit to the doctor’s office simply isn’t practical. What is new is this: telemedicine has made a significant leap in recent months.
A recent global consumer survey by Dynata took a closer look at this trend. The research spanned age groups and nations across North America and Europe, which found that 39% of its respondents consulted a physician or healthcare professional online in the past few months. Of them, two-thirds said they used telemedicine as part of their care. Yet more telling, 84% of those who recently had a telemedicine appointment said this was the first time they used telemedicine.
Dynata’s study also looked at their attitudes and experiences with telemedicine based on age and reported that members of the Baby Boomer generation found the experience satisfactory—just over 55%. Interestingly, this was also quite consistent across other age groups, with all hovering just above or below that same level of satisfaction.
Another study gives us insight into how seniors’ opinions about telemedicine may have changed in the past year. We can contrast the findings above with a University of Michigan study that polled American adults aged 50 to 80 in the middle of 2019. On the topic of telemedicine, the research found that:
The University of Michigan study also asked how older Americans felt about telemedicine visits. At that time in 2019, only 14% said that their provider offered telemedicine visits, while 55% didn’t know if they had the option available to them at all. Just a small number, 4%, said they’d had a telemedicine visit within the year. Needless to say, it’ll be interesting to see what 2020’s results would have to say should the university run this poll again.
In terms of their experience with telemedicine, of those who had at least one telemedicine visit, 58% felt that in-person office visits provided an overall better level of care, and about 55% felt that in-person visits were better for communicating with their healthcare professional and feeling better cared-for overall.
→ Dig Deeper: 6 Tips for a Safer and Easier Telemedicine Visit
While it may seem daunting for seniors to navigate the world of telemedicine, there are several advantages to this healthcare approach. One of the main benefits of telemedicine is the elimination of travel time. This can be particularly beneficial for seniors with mobility issues or living in rural areas lacking transportation. As all consultations are conducted virtually, seniors can access healthcare from the comfort of their homes.
Another benefit is the ease of monitoring chronic conditions. Telemedicine allows healthcare providers to closely monitor patients’ symptoms and adjust treatment plans without requiring frequent office visits. This not only saves time but can also lead to better health outcomes. With health trackers and mobile applications, healthcare providers can remotely monitor vitals like blood sugar levels or heart rate, enabling immediate intervention if required.
→ Dig Deeper: How to Make Telehealth Safer for a More Convenient Life Online
The main barrier to telemedicine for seniors is often technology. A lack of familiarity with the required devices and applications can prove daunting for some. However, with a little help and guidance, this can be overcome. Caregivers, family members, or telemedicine providers can teach seniors how to use the necessary technology. Various user-friendly applications are designed with seniors in mind, simplifying the process.
Providers also often have customer support available to assist with any technological difficulties. It’s essential to remember that the benefits of telemedicine can considerably outweigh the initial learning curve of navigating these new tools. Practice and patience can go a long way in making telemedicine a comfortable and convenient option for seniors.
McAfee Pro Tip: One essential item seniors should have during their visit is a dependable device they are familiar with. This could include a desktop computer, laptop, smartphone, or tablet. Remember that certain telemedicine solutions used by healthcare providers might have specific requirements, so it’s important to check those and ensure their devices are compatible.
Telemedicine can benefit seniors, offering more accessible healthcare services and better chronic condition management. While technological may seem challenging, it can be successfully navigated with the right guidance and support. Ultimately, telemedicine is a tool to improve healthcare accessibility and outcomes for seniors, and taking the first steps towards embracing it can lead to better health and comfort.
Improve your telemedicine use with McAfee+, which comes with identity monitoring, unlimited VPN, antivirus, scam protection, data cleanup, and more.
The post Medical Care From Home: Telemedicine and Seniors appeared first on McAfee Blog.
A shocking number of organizations — including banks and healthcare providers — are leaking private and sensitive information from their public Salesforce Community websites, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The data exposures all stem from a misconfiguration in Salesforce Community that allows an unauthenticated user to access records that should only be available after logging in.
A researcher found DC Health had five Salesforce Community sites exposing data.
Salesforce Community is a widely-used cloud-based software product that makes it easy for organizations to quickly create websites. Customers can access a Salesforce Community website in two ways: Authenticated access (requiring login), and guest user access (no login required). The guest access feature allows unauthenticated users to view specific content and resources without needing to log in.
However, sometimes Salesforce administrators mistakenly grant guest users access to internal resources, which can cause unauthorized users to access an organization’s private information and lead to potential data leaks.
Until being contacted by this reporter on Monday, the state of Vermont had at least five separate Salesforce Community sites that allowed guest access to sensitive data, including a Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program that exposed the applicant’s full name, Social Security number, address, phone number, email, and bank account number.
This misconfigured Salesforce Community site from the state of Vermont was leaking pandemic assistance loan application data, including names, SSNs, email address and bank account information.
Vermont’s Chief Information Security Officer Scott Carbee said his security teams have been conducting a full review of their Salesforce Community sites, and already found one additional Salesforce site operated by the state that was also misconfigured to allow guest access to sensitive information.
“My team is frustrated by the permissive nature of the platform,” Carbee said.
Carbee said the vulnerable sites were all created rapidly in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, and were not subjected to their normal security review process.
“During the pandemic, we were largely standing up tons of applications, and let’s just say a lot of them didn’t have the full benefit of our dev/ops process,” Carbee said. “In our case, we didn’t have any native Salesforce developers when we had to suddenly stand up all these sites.”
Earlier this week, KrebsOnSecurity notified Columbus, Ohio-based Huntington Bank that its recently acquired TCF Bank had a Salesforce Community website that was leaking documents related to commercial loans. The data fields in those loan applications included name, address, full Social Security number, title, federal ID, IP address, average monthly payroll, and loan amount.
Huntington Bank has disabled the leaky TCF Bank Salesforce website. Matthew Jennings, deputy chief information security officer at Huntington, said the company was still investigating how the misconfiguration occurred, how long it lasted, and how many records may have been exposed.
KrebsOnSecurity learned of the leaks from security researcher Charan Akiri, who said he wrote a program that identified hundreds of other organizations running misconfigured Salesforce pages. But Akiri said he’s been wary of probing too far, and has had difficulty getting responses from most of the organizations he has notified to date.
“In January and February 2023, I contacted government organizations and several companies, but I did not receive any response from these organizations,” Akiri said. “To address the issue further, I reached out to several CISOs on LinkedIn and Twitter. As a result, five companies eventually fixed the problem. Unfortunately, I did not receive any responses from government organizations.”
The problem Akiri has been trying to raise awareness about came to the fore in August 2021, when security researcher Aaron Costello published a blog post explaining how misconfigurations in Salesforce Community sites could be exploited to reveal sensitive data (Costello subsequently published a follow-up post detailing how to lock down Salesforce Community sites).
On Monday, KrebsOnSecurity used Akiri’s findings to notify Washington D.C. city administrators that at least five different public DC Health websites were leaking sensitive information. One DC Health Salesforce Community website designed for health professionals seeking to renew licenses with the city leaked documents that included the applicant’s full name, address, Social Security number, date of birth, license number and expiration, and more.
Akiri said he notified the Washington D.C. government in February about his findings, but received no response. Reached by KrebsOnSecurity, interim Chief Information Security Officer Mike Rupert initially said the District had hired a third party to investigate, and that the third party confirmed the District’s IT systems were not vulnerable to data loss from the reported Salesforce configuration issue.
But after being presented with a document including the Social Security number of a health professional in D.C. that was downloaded in real-time from the DC Health public Salesforce website, Rupert acknowledged his team had overlooked some configuration settings.
Washington, D.C. health administrators are still smarting from a data breach earlier this year at the health insurance exchange DC Health Link, which exposed personal information for more than 56,000 users, including many members of Congress.
That data later wound up for sale on a top cybercrime forum. The Associated Press reports that the DC Health Link breach was likewise the result of human error, and said an investigation revealed the cause was a DC Health Link server that was “misconfigured to allow access to the reports on the server without proper authentication.”
Salesforce says the data exposures are not the result of a vulnerability inherent to the Salesforce platform, but they can occur when customers’ access control permissions are misconfigured.
“As previously communicated to all Experience Site and Sites customers, we recommend utilizing the Guest User Access Report Package to assist in reviewing access control permissions for unauthenticated users,” reads a Salesforce advisory from Sept. 2022. “Additionally, we suggest reviewing the following Help article, Best Practices and Considerations When Configuring the Guest User Profile.”
In a written statement, Salesforce said it is actively focused on data security for organizations with guest users, and that it continues to release “robust tools and guidance for our customers,” including:
Control Which Users Experience Cloud Site Users Can See
Best Practices and Considerations When Configuring the Guest User Profile
“We’ve also continued to update our Guest User security policies, beginning with our Spring ‘21 release with more to come in Summer ‘23,” the statement reads. “Lastly, we continue to proactively communicate with customers to help them understand the capabilities available to them, and how they can best secure their instance of Salesforce to meet their security, contractual, and regulatory obligations.”
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) this week arrested a New York man on suspicion of running BreachForums, a popular English-language cybercrime forum where some of the world biggest hacked databases routinely show up for sale. The forum’s administrator “Pompompurin” has been a thorn in the side of the FBI for years, and BreachForums is widely considered a reincarnation of RaidForums, a remarkably similar crime forum that the FBI infiltrated and dismantled in 2022.
Federal agents carting items out of Fitzpatrick’s home on March 15. Image: News 12 Westchester.
In an affidavit filed with the District Court for the Southern District of New York, FBI Special Agent John Longmire said that at around 4:30 p.m. on March 15, 2023, he led a team of law enforcement agents that made a probable cause arrest of a Conor Brian Fitzpatrick in Peekskill, NY.
“When I arrested the defendant on March 15, 2023, he stated to me in substance and in part that: a) his name was Conor Brian Fitzpatrick; b) he used the alias ‘pompompurin/’ and c) he was the owner and administrator of ‘BreachForums’ the data breach website referenced in the Complaint,” Longmire wrote.
Pompompurin has been something of a nemesis to the FBI for several years. In November 2021, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that thousands of fake emails about a cybercrime investigation were blasted out from the FBI’s email systems and Internet addresses.
Pompompurin took credit for that stunt, and said he was able to send the FBI email blast by exploiting a flaw in an FBI portal designed to share information with state and local law enforcement authorities. The FBI later acknowledged that a software misconfiguration allowed someone to send the fake emails.
In December, 2022, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that hackers active on BreachForums had infiltrated the FBI’s InfraGard program, a vetted FBI program designed to build cyber and physical threat information sharing partnerships with experts in the private sector. The hackers impersonated the CEO of a major financial company, applied for InfraGard membership in the CEO’s name, and were granted admission to the community.
From there, the hackers plundered the InfraGard member database, and proceeded to sell contact information on more than 80,000 InfraGard members in an auction on BreachForums. The FBI responded by disabling the portal for some time, before ultimately forcing all InfraGard members to re-apply for membership.
More recently, BreachForums was the sales forum for data stolen from DC Health Link, a health insurance exchange based in Washington, D.C. that suffered a data breach this month. The sales thread initially said the data included the names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, health plan and enrollee information and more on 170,000 individuals, although the official notice about the breach says 56,415 people were affected.
In April 2022, U.S. Justice Department seized the servers and domains for RaidForums, an extremely popular English-language cybercrime forum that sold access to more than 10 billion consumer records stolen in some of the world’s largest data breaches since 2015. As part of that operation, the feds also charged the alleged administrator, 21-year-old Diogo Santos Coelho of Portugal, with six criminal counts.
Coelho was arrested in the United Kingdom on Jan. 31, 2022. By that time, the new BreachForums had been live for just under a week, but with a familiar look.
BreachForums remains accessible online, and from reviewing the live chat stream on the site’s home page it appears the forum’s active users are only just becoming aware that their administrator — and the site’s database — is likely now in FBI hands:
Members of BreachForums discuss the arrest of the forum’s alleged owner.
“Wait if they arrested pom then doesn’t the FBI have all of our details we’ve registered with?” asked one worried BreachForums member.
“But we all have good VPNs I guess, right…right guys?” another denizen offered.
“Like pom would most likely do a plea bargain and cooperate with the feds as much as possible,” replied another.
Fitzpatrick could not be immediately reached for comment. The FBI declined to comment for this story.
There is only one page to the criminal complaint against Fitzpatrick (PDF), which charges him with one count of conspiracy to commit access device fraud. The affidavit on his arrest is available here (PDF).
Update: Corrected spelling of FBI agent’s last name.
As we wrapped up October, we also put the final touches on a flurry of activities to celebrate Cyber Security Awareness Month. The tradition of October as National Cybersecurity Awareness Month goes back to 2004 when Congress and the White House tasked the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCA) to join forces to help individuals protect themselves online as threats to technology and confidential data became more commonplace. There is no question that the scale and severity of threats have only increased exponentially in the nearly two decades we have been actively participating in cybersecurity awareness.
This year’s theme was “See Yourself in Cyber” to reinforce the fact that that while cybersecurity is technology-driven, ultimately, it’s really all about people that makes it real. So, this month is all about sharing information across the cybersecurity industry with individuals and companies around the world so we can all be more effective together. That gives me a great opportunity to discuss a related issue that profoundly impacts professionals who work in cybersecurity every single day: mental health.
Working in cybersecurity can be a stressful endeavor, which is why I’m so proud to be part of this global network of professionals who have dedicated our work lives to this important mission. We must be ever vigilant and on guard against threats and bad actors, both known and unknown. It is this ever-changing world of cybersecurity work that only compounds the stress level. The possibilities of work-related depression and burnout are real and becoming more common. According to this Forbes column, more than half of cybersecurity professionals in the US and Europe are on medication to help improve work-related mental health.
I wrote extensively about ways we can help our colleagues and employees work through mental health issues in this blog last May commemorating the official Mental Health Awareness Month. The key takeaways I closed with are worth repeating.
From a technology point of view, we at Cisco Secure are committed to the goal of helping organizations become more security resilient. We know that unpredictability is the nature of working in cybersecurity. But by being more resilient I firmly believe that we can help organizations to be able to withstand the ever-changing threat landscape and ultimately emerge stronger.
Naturally, our goal is to extend the benefits of resilience downstream to the cybersecurity pros who are on the frontlines of battling threats and bad actors. To that end, there are a couple of resources I’d like to point to. One, the American Psychological Association offers a few very helpful ways people can develop more resilience with regards to mental health. Two, Cisco offers great resources to help you either enter the cybersecurity field or enhance your career through advanced training education. Additionally, Cisco has made a commitment to the White House as part of the Cyber Workforce and Education Summit to train more than 200,000 students to join the cybersecurity field over the next three years.
November 16 happens to be the UN International Day for Tolerance. Like the word resilience, tolerance can take on several different meanings. But I want to take the opportunity to apply it to another critical issue impacting the cybersecurity industry: the need for a more diverse and inclusive workforce. I covered some of these themes in one of the earliest blogs I posted after joining Cisco. I look forward to providing additional perspectives with some of the latest trends and stats we are seeing within Cisco Secure.
Wouldn’t it be nice if, along with grades for English, Science, and Algebra this year, our child’s report card included quarterly feedback on their mental health?
Recently, actor Tom Holland of Spider-Man fame reported on his mental health publicly by deleting several of his social media accounts. The actor stated that his social media accounts had become “detrimental” to his mental state and that he “spirals” when he reads things about himself online. He used words like “overstimulating” and “overwhelming.”
And parents were likely “overjoyed” giving cyber high fives all around with Holland’s transparency in talking so publicly about social media’s link to mental health. Because if you are a parent you know.
As we head into a new school year with high hopes in tow, Holland’s decision also challenges us to pay closer attention to how social media could potentially impact our kids’ mental health.
Every child’s maturity and cognitive ability to handle online challenges will differ, so a one-size-fits-all digital wellbeing plan isn’t likely to work. Here are a few insights and tips that may be helpful as you shape the method that works for your family.
Explore healthy social media limits.
Any way you slice it, many unknowns come with every new school year, especially if you have tweens or teens. Social media adds a layer of complexity to those unknowns. However, with some forethought and follow-through, you can navigate those risks one day at a time.
The post Back-to-School: Balancing Social Media & Mental Health appeared first on McAfee Blog.
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