Welcome! Your Privacy and Security Concerns of Tele-Health plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

18-09-2020 • 11 min

Welcome!

Craig explains Why you should be concerned about your private health information when using a Telehealth application.

For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Coming up in this hour, we're going to be talking about some of these cyber risks that are really exploded because of the telehealth services. We'll tell you about that. And online voting. Price gouging and defective products rampant on Amazon.

Hey, listening to Craig Peterson on news radio 98.5 FM and AM 560. Want to remind everybody, if you have one of those smart speakers, All you have to do is ask it to play WGAN, and you'll catch me right there on your smart device, as well as everybody else. All the other great programming that we have here.

Let's get right into it. And I talked, at least I wanted to talk a little bit about this with Matt Gagnon on Wednesday morning, where I am every Wednesday at about seven 34. And this has to do with, of course, the whole COVID thing.

So many of us now are afraid to go out. We're afraid to go to the doctors. There's been some interesting statistics looking at some of the hospitals who are saying, Whoa, wait a minute. Heart attack patients. We're just not seeing the number of heart attack patients what's going on, is COVID making people his heart's function better. Having fewer heart attacks. What is it? When they delved into it, what they were finding is that there were people still having heart attacks, probably at about the same rate as always. And of course, we know that certain people have a response to the COVID-19 part of the Wuhan virus that includes death damage to cardiac tissue.

So how could it be? What's going on? They were just afraid to go to the hospital. So many of us are free to go out. So many of us are afraid to go to the hospitals, even when we're sick.

So first off everybody, I know I say all of the time, the hospital, is the worst place to be when you're sick? Because it is. There are diseases you can catch there that you just can't catch anywhere else. But the hospital also has the ability to save your life. They can go in, they can look at problems. They can fix problems. Maybe you need an adjustment as simple as your diet, but maybe what you need is some surgeries, stint who knows what you might need. So don't put off going to the hospital.

Now, when it comes to the doctor's office, you women out there know that men don't like to go to the doctor. We never go, I don't need to go. And once our arms and twisted enough, sometimes we will go. But now you're no one, you're just not going to the doctor.

Most of the time. I do know some people that do go to the doctor all of the time, maybe more than they probably should. And I probably fall into the category of, I don't go as often as maybe I should, but we're now doing these doctor visits online. I'm not sure that's the best idea. It's also not the worst idea, but we've seen this massive adoption of people using apps on their phones and on their computers to talk to a doctor most of the time, not even their doctor.

Depending on what kind of consultation you need. You can get a doctor for 40 bucks all the way on up through I, when I looked last, it was like $150 for a bit more of a specialist and they can only prescribe certain things. They can't prescribe other things and goes back and forth.

But what we have seen that's definitive. When it comes to these remote docs is that there has been an increase in the risks and compromises within the healthcare industry. There's a new piece of research out. I have it up on my website and it was posted here on Dark Reading as well, this last week by security scorecard, Dark Owl. And they found that the rapid onboarding of these technologies that we've been talking about on the show forever, right? Zoom. Don't use Zoom. Zoom's, not safe, right? It's not credible. It hasn't been analyzed. It's not HIPAA compliant, et cetera.

So the rapid onboarding of all of this stuff has not only hurt businesses who have lost information. Zoom is trying to pull up its socks here, as far as security goes. Also true in the medical field where they've started using them now to really let them talk to you. Deliver services to a minor degree. They can call in a prescription for instance, to a pharmacy for you.

It is significantly broadened this attack surface of many of the healthcare organizations out there. When we're talking about our broad attack surface. What we mean is instead of just having to break into one computer at one location, they actually going to have to break in, or at least have the opportunity to break-in at a whole bunch of locations.

That means your home. They could come in through your home computer. Potentially, in fact, a remote computer that you're connected to, depending on how you're connected.

We're also now as a doctor exposing your home computer, maybe your office, this network to hackers because now you're on your home network. You are using a VPN into the office so you can look at your patient record, so you can add things onto your patient tracking system and your electronic medical records.

Those EMR systems might be in your office and might be online but now you're using them from computers that aren't very well protected. That's part of the reason I keep reminding everybody that your home networks need to be just as protected as those networks that are at the office. So if you are a doctor and you have HIPAA regulations while. Any of the computers you're using as part of your doctor's office need to so comply with the HIPAA regulations.

If you are a government contractor subcontractor, you're going to have to make sure that the computers are CMMC or maybe they meet the NIST standards, et cetera.

So security card and dark owl analyzed the data related to the use of telehealth, these remote doc programs here from 148 vendors. They looked at healthcare providers around the country, as they're looking at it. Now we have seen a massive change in the way we do business. There's no question that we've really seen a business reboot here.

We've seen some serious problems. I was on a call earlier this week, part of, one of my masterminds. One of the members of the mastermind has a business that provides some marketing services for gyms, gymnasiums. When was the last time you went to a gym? They are struggling. He's wondering why his marketing, isn't working anymore? I thought the answer to that was pretty darn obvious. People just aren't using gyms anymore.

But the same thing's true with office space. Saw an article this week that I did not include because I didn't think it reached that level, but it was talking about a business that paid $60 million to buy it's way out of a contract for leasing space. We're going to be seeing more and more of that as time goes on.

Now a lot of it, frankly, and the same, thing are going to be true for, I think doctors and doctor's offices, because when you're looking at it, if the doctor is using Tele-docs. Why do they need to have as much physical office spaces as they used to have?

So prior to the pandemic, these Teladoc services were in news by about 1% of the overall. Health care provider visits, if you will. Is it a visit really when you're on one of these Teladoc apps, but it was used less than 1% of the time. Now we've got this big blown up public health emergency due to them and it has resulted in primary care visits, dropping like a rock after mid-March that's a surprise. At the same time, the Teladoc apps soared 350%. That is absolutely huge. That's from a report that I'm looking at here from the US department of health and human services.

Now what really concerns me about all that, isn't, that we're going online. I'm concerned about these docs using insecure apps, like Zoom. I'm concerned about docs using VPNs incorrectly, like every other business out there that are not using them correctly. The speed that they transitioned, businesses and doctors, and in this case, here to these online health services, has really not let healthcare providers properly vet any of these teledoc products for security issues or to ensure they're safe to use. I absolutely agree with that. That's the conclusion that Security Scorecard came to as well.

So here's a quote from. The chief R and D officer over at Security Scorecard, we examined the 148 most popular telehealth apps from a number of angles. There are concerns across the board from the development deployment and configuration of the app, patients themselves, as well as a digital supply chain that supports them.

So think about that for a minute, right? These apps themselves are not written properly. They're not implemented properly. The docs have not installed them properly and are not using them properly. What could possibly go wrong?

Now? I know some of you are out there saying right now, Hey, Craig, it's my medical record. So I really don't care that people know I have type one diabetes or whatever your condition might be.

In reality. A lot of people want to know that information, right? So for instance, let's say a scammer knows that you're a type one diabetic. They can now use that to fine-tune yes, the messages to you these phishing messages they've been sending out.

So be very careful, a lot of different alerts, a lot of, by the way, increase chatter out on the dark web. So keep an eye out for that two mentions of telehealth vendors, products like Teladoc, Careclicks, MeMD jumped dramatically on the dark web after the pandemic began. No big surprise there,.

All right. Stick around. When we come back, we're going to talk about online voting and we're going to compare a little bit to banking. You can do banking online. Why can't I vote online? What's going on here?

Hey, stick around. You're listening to the Craig Peterson show here on WGAN.

We'll be right back with a whole lot more and make sure you tune in as well on Wednesday mornings. You can, of course, hear me at about seven 30 with Mr. Matt Gagnon as he goes through some of the news of the week.

So we'll be right back.

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