Alcide announces HIPAA compliance to protect healthcare data during COVID-19

Alcide, a Kubernetes security provider, now supports HIPAA compliance scans, allowing 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.

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.”

The new HIPAA compliance scanning capability adds to PCI and GDPR compliance scans that were announced by Alcide earlier this year.

The Healthcare industry has been experiencing a surge of cyber attacks. This increase in hacking attempts has prompted cybersecurity professionals to form a response group called Cyber Volunteers 19 (CV19).

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.

For more information about this update, visit www.alcide.io.