HIPAA Security Best Practices & Brute Force Attacks

If you are in the medical field and transfer or store information about patients, you are considered a “covered entity” under HIPAA. Protecting HIPAA-covered PHI is each covered entity’s responsibility and an immeasurably important part of protecting your business. 

Being lax with website security could bring stiff fines and can also severely hurt your reputation with patients and anyone in the medical field you’ve partnered with. Keeping such mistakes silent isn’t even a possibility because of the HIPAA breach notification rule. 

Using HIPAA-compliant database software is one of the most important steps you will ever take for your business. It all starts with protecting your login page against brute force attacks. That’s why you need a HIPAA eCommerce platform that incorporates the latest medical information security software available.  

What Are Brute Force Attacks?

Not all bots are bad; nothing could be indexed on the internet without them. But many bots and botnets are created by hackers to search for “low hanging fruit” opportunities as they try to bypass safeguards put in place by HIPAA compliance software. They send out this malicious code to constantly scan the internet with the intention to break into sites and steal personal information. 

These relatively simple batches of code test every new site that shows up on the internet. They are so efficient at finding new websites that they might even find a site before search engines do. Bots can also use public information regarding newly registered domains, collecting internet addresses to start the attack as soon as it goes live. Whether you like it or nost, putting a single login page on the internet is essentially saying, “It's okay to attack us now.” That’s why you must be ready with HIPAA compliant software to hold up against the attackers. 

Bot Dangers to HIPAA Information

What are bots, and what exactly are you up against? Much like the robots from which they were named, bots are meant to accomplish tasks without supervision. They are autonomous, reporting back to their users once vulnerabilities have been identified. 

Bots’ primary targets are login pages, where they try to crack passwords, encryption keys, API keys, and SSL logins. A bot doesn’t have to be told to attack sites, and it doesn’t care about the type of business it’s attacking; nearly every site contains some data to exploit. Servers and applications are being attacked by bots every hour of every day. After all, there’s not just one bot to defend against. There are thousands, and hackers write more every day. 

Bots are not complex and therefore aren’t very “smart,” but they are persistent. The brute force method they use means that they’re simply trying every combination of numbers, letters, and symbols to find a password that gets them to information stored behind a login page. This method is essentially trial and error repeated billions of times. 

How Are Brute Force Attacks Thwarted?

Bots might be relatively unsophisticated, but they’re still very successful against sites that haven’t taken the proper steps to install protection for their HIPAA-protected information. The best way to prevent brute force attacks is to have the proper security protocols in place. 

Bots can break through this first level of security even if initial steps are taken to prevent them. How? It is possible that the security features weren’t properly implemented by the developers, or the person in charge of monitoring bot software didn’t update it against the most recent generation. 

The HIPAA Breach Notification Rule

Preventing brute force attack breaches is important, but multiple layers of security are still needed. Software that satisfies the HIPAA encryption requirement will follow steps set forth by OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project). Following their ten basic rules ensures that a site is reasonably impenetrable, and software providers can take more steps to bolster HIPAA data encryption. 

But considering how valuable HIPAA information is, the best human hackers may be successful once they succeed with a brute force attack. Breaches have occurred when HIPAA encryption requirements are not followed. This violates the HIPAA breach notification rule. A breach occurs when there is an impermissible use or disclosure of PHI. 

The following must happen after an electronic or physical breach: 

 
If these consequences sound alarming, the best course of action is to contact a HIPAA compliant software vendor that can properly incorporate defenses against electronic attacks you may encounter.