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Alcide Releases Free HIPAA Scan to help Healthcare Companies During COVID-19

Scan Kubernetes Deployments for Compliance Risks Related to Protected Health Information

TEL AVIV, Israel, April 2nd, 2020 – Alcide, the Kubernetes security leader empowering DevSecOps teams with end-to-end continuous security guardrails for Kubernetes deployments, today announced that the Alcide Kubernetes Security Platform now supports HIPAA compliance scans. The new HIPAA compliance scanning capability adds to PCI and GDPR compliance scans that were announced by Alcide earlier this year, enabling DevOps and compliance managers to rapidly assess HIPAA regulatory compliance for free during a period where hackers are targeting vulnerabilities in software rushed into service to help combat COVID-19.

The Healthcare industry has been experiencing a surge of cyber attacks. For example, hackers recently targeted Hammersmith Medicines Research, a British company that is preparing to perform medical trials on prospective COVID-19 vaccines. On March 14, hackers known for stealing private data and threatening to post it online unless a ransom is paid attempted to break into Hammersmith’s systems. The intrusion was detected and repelled, but some data had been exfiltrated and was subsequently posted online in an attempt to extort the company to pay a ransom. This increase in hacking attempts has even prompted cybersecurity professionals to form a response group called Cyber Volunteers 19 (CV19). Alcide is contributing to security efforts that support healthcare organizations by offering a free HIPAA compliance scan for Kubernetes deployments using the Alcide Kubernetes Advisor.

“Alcide is stepping between hackers and the valiant heroes fighting the virus by offering free scans for HIPAA compliance,” said Amir Ofek, CEO at Alcide. “This is a time when people should be coming together to aid the global response to COVID-19, and it’s shameful that some hacker groups are seeking to victimize those who are helping on the front lines of the crisis.”

A study by Alcide in 2019 revealed that 89% of Kubernetes deployments were not leveraging critical security resources within K8s, leaving applications vulnerable to exposing sensitive and private information. Alcide helps compliance managers score their HIPAA compliance by providing them with the below set of automated checks:

• Instant visibility – enables companies to automatically discover cloud and Kubernetes workloads using a graphical representation of infrastructure and applications (services) that update in real time. HIPAA environments can be classified using Kubernetes native tags to aid the secure management of HIPAA-related data flows.
• Identify and document asset vulnerabilities – Alcide’s built-in HIPAA package provides automated checks for compliance with standards such as the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmark for Kubernetes and scans for Common Vulnerabilities and Exploits (CVEs).
• Monitor for access control – monitors and alerts on all access to governed workloads. Alcide also ensures that Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is correctly configured to limit access to HIPAA-related resources.
• Protect data-in-transit – ensure that Kubernetes resources that expose HIPAA data to open, public networks are configured with Transport Layer Security (TLS).
• Regularly update risk assessment information – threat intelligence and CVE data is periodically updated from well-known repositories such as open-source lists and commercial vendors. 
• Ongoing scan of audit logs for risks – uses machine learning to build profiles of user behaviors and scans K8s audit logs to detect abusive or abnormal activity.

Alcide now offers a free HIPAA security package for the healthcare community. Healthcare organizations can now use Alcide’s security SaaS platform to secure development and production deployments of containerized applications on Kubernetes. From scanning vulnerabilities in Kubernetes clusters to detecting anomalous behavior and defining policies for firewalling microservices, the Alcide Kubernetes Security Platform is ready to help the healthcare community.

• Sign up for a free HIPAA scan of your Kubernetes application.
• Read the article ‘Scan for HIPAA vulnerabilities in your environment. For free.’

About Alcide

Alcide is a Kubernetes security leader empowering DevOps teams to drive seamless security guardrails to their CI/CD pipelines, and security teams to continuously secure and protect their growing Kubernetes deployments. Alcide provides a single Kubernetes-native AI-driven security platform for cross Kubernetes aspects: configuration risks, visibility across clusters, and run-time security events. Combined with policies enforcement, and a behavioral anomaly engine that detects anomalous and malicious network activity, Alcide ensures that the entire Dev. to production pipeline is secured.