Cybersecurity Advisory: Enhancing Cyber Resilience: Insights from the CISA Healthcare and Public Health Sector Risk and Vulnerability Assessment

Summary

In January 2023, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) conducted a Risk and Vulnerability Assessment (RVA) at the request of a Healthcare and Public Health (HPH) sector organization to identify vulnerabilities and areas for improvement. An RVA is a two-week penetration test of an entire organization, with one week spent on external testing and one week spent assessing the internal network. As part of the RVA, the CISA assessment team conducted web application, phishing, penetration, database, and wireless assessments. The assessed organization was a large organization deploying on-premises software.

During the one-week external assessment, the assessment team did not identify any significant or exploitable conditions in externally available systems that may allow a malicious actor to easily obtain initial access to the organization’s network. Furthermore, the assessment team was unable to gain initial access to the assessed organization through phishing. However, during internal penetration testing, the team exploited misconfigurations, weak passwords, and other issues through multiple attack paths to compromise the organization’s domain.

In coordination with the assessed organization, CISA is releasing this Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) detailing the RVA team’s activities and key findings to provide network defenders and software manufacturers recommendations for improving their organizations’ and customers’ cyber posture, which reduces the impact of follow-on activity after initial access. CISA encourages the HPH sector and other critical infrastructure organizations deploying on-premises software, as well as software manufacturers, to apply the recommendations in the Mitigations section of this CSA to harden networks against malicious activity and to reduce the likelihood of domain compromise.

View the detailed report below.