CynergisTek Partners with Awake Security to Identify Adversaries in Healthcare Networks

CynergisTek, Inc. (NYSE AMERICAN: CTEK), a leader in information security, privacy, and compliance, today announced it has partnered with Awake Security to offer CynergisTek’s customer base of more than 1,000 healthcare organizations a new compromise assessment. The assessment combines human expertise in digital forensics and incident response, threat intelligence, as well as Awake’s network detection and response technology that hunts for attacker behaviors and provides forensics across networks to enable autonomous responses.

“As America’s hospitals scrambled to respond to the pandemic, the entire threat landscape and the associated attack surface completely changed, placing America’s hospitals squarely in the cross hairs for adversarial activity. New vulnerabilities from telemedicine combined with an increased network footprint due to work-from-home employees and we have a perfect storm for increased cyber attacks. This partnership allows us to identify adversarial activity including reconnaissance in its early stages allowing organizations to re-baseline their security posture as they return to normal operations,” said Ben Denkers, SVP of Security and Privacy Services at CynergisTek. “We’re excited to partner with Awake Security and bring a unique offering to our clients which leverages autonomous threat hunting and network forensic technology to identify any malicious behavior in healthcare organizations during this time of upheaval.”

COVID-19 has caused tectonic shifts in hospitals and other health-related organizations’ security postures and attack surfaces. As vulnerabilities have significantly increased, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and other healthcare institutions are particularly at risk as cybercriminals aim to create even more chaos among this sector already buckling under the pressure by a meteoric rise in coronavirus cases. This is made worse by a distributed healthcare workforce, vulnerable intellectual property related to COVID-19 research, and dwindling IT budgets and resources.

Through the partnership, CynergisTek and Awake are assembling the best minds in networking, machine learning, data science, cybersecurity, privacy, and compliance to help healthcare organizations get a more complete view and understanding of their potential attack surface -- including every user, medical device, and application on the network. By doing so, hospitals will be able to track every asset that moves across their network, whether on-premises or from remote users working in the cloud, while identifying high-risk incidents and compromised entities without the need for agents, manual configuration, or complex integrations.

“Sensitive healthcare data is extremely valuable to hackers, and we know they aren’t sitting on the sidelines during the pandemic, but are in fact attacking both hospitals and pharmaceutical companies during this volatile time,” said Rahul Kashyap, CEO of Awake Security. “We are always looking to partner with forward-thinking companies like CynergisTek to help organizations detect and respond to threats they may not even know existed. In times like this, we’re excited to help healthcare entities for this ‘all-hands-on-deck’ moment to bolster their defenses and prevent crises from emerging and impacting patients.”

About CynergisTek, Inc.

CynergisTek is a top-ranked cybersecurity firm dedicated to serving the information assurance needs of the healthcare industry. CynergisTek offers specialized services and solutions to help organizations achieve privacy, security, and compliance goals. Since 2004, the company has served as a partner to hundreds of healthcare organizations and is dedicated to supporting and educating the industry by contributing to relevant industry associations. The company has been recognized by KLAS as a top-performing firm in healthcare cybersecurity and was awarded the 2019 Top Healthcare Cybersecurity Consultants in Black Book IT Advisory Outcomes Survey.

About Awake Security

Awake Security is the only advanced network detection and response company that delivers answers, not alerts. By combining artificial intelligence with human expertise, Awake autonomously models and hunts for both insider and external attacker behaviors, while providing triage, digital forensics and incident response across the new network—perimeter, core, IoT and cloud networks. The platform is ranked #1 by EMA for time to value and was recognized as the #1 information security solution being evaluated by global 1000 companies in Enterprise Technology Research’s (ETR) Summer 2019 Emerging Technology Study.

Awake is backed by Greylock Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, Evolution Equity Partners, Energize Ventures and Liberty Global Ventures. Learn more at https://www.awakesecurity.com and follow Awake on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

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