Malicious Domain Blocking and Reporting for Hospitals

 

With the increasing industry shift to electronic health records and other digital technologies, cybersecurity has become a strategic priority for the healthcare industry. Cyber-attacks against hospitals and other healthcare facilities can put patient safety at risk by locking critical systems and records. In some cases, these attacks can result in patient care being delayed or cancelled. During the COVID-19 pandemic, ransomware has emerged as the largest cyber threat facing healthcare facilities, resulting in data theft and the disruption of healthcare services.

 

Cyber Defense for U.S. Hospitals

The Center for Internet Security®, in partnership with Akamai, is offering the Malicious Domain Blocking and Reporting (MDBR) service to all public hospitals and related healthcare organizations in the United States. This service provides an additional layer of cybersecurity protection that is proven, effective, and easy to deploy.

MDBR is a fully-managed protective domain name system (PDNS), with CIS and Akamai fully maintaining the systems required to provide the service. Once an organization points its DNS requests to Akamai’s DNS server IP addresses, every DNS lookup will be compared against a list of known and suspected malicious domains. 

The logged data is then provided by Akamai to CIS’s Security Operations Center (SOC). The SOC uses this data to perform detailed analysis and aggregate reporting for the benefit of the hospital community, as well as organization-specific reporting and intelligence services. If circumstances require, remediation assistance is provided for each organization that implements the service.