Healthcare Cybersecurity
CERT-In empanelled cybersecurity services for Healthcare organisations. 6,700+ assessments delivered since 2006.
Challenges
Security challenges in Healthcare
HIPAA compliance for organizations handling US patient data or serving US-based clients
Patient data protection — EHR/EMR systems, telemedicine platforms, diagnostic lab integrations
IoMT and medical device security — connected devices often running unsupported operating systems
Legacy hospital information systems with decades-old architectures
Clinical network segmentation between patient-facing, administrative, and medical device networks
ABDM (Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission) compliance for Indian healthcare providers
Trusted by
The shape of the risk
A hospital cannot fail closed
Every other sector on this site can take a system offline while it is fixed. Clinical systems are the exception, and it changes what testing is allowed to look like.
The constraint that defines healthcare security is that the safe failure mode is unavailable. A payment system that stops is an incident; an imaging system that stops during a procedure is a clinical event. That rules out a great deal of ordinary testing practice — no active scanning against a device in clinical use, no fuzzing an interface a monitor depends on, no patching window that assumes an eight-hour outage. It also means the estate accumulates: equipment with a fifteen-year service life runs an operating system that reached end of support a decade ago, cannot be patched without revalidation, and cannot be replaced because the replacement costs more than the department's annual budget. Assessment here is about establishing what is actually reachable and what compensating control stands in front of it, not about producing a vulnerability count that the organisation already knows and cannot action.
The estate
What is actually connected in a hospital
The systems that hold the data and the systems that deliver the care are on the same network far more often than either team believes.
HIS and EMR
The record system and everything integrated into it — orders, results, discharge, and the interfaces that carry them between departments.
Imaging and PACS
DICOM services, modality worklists and archives. Imaging protocols were designed for a trusted network and frequently authenticate weakly or not at all.
Connected medical devices
Infusion pumps, monitors, analysers and anything else with an address. Often unmanaged, often unpatchable, and often on the same segment as the workstation someone reads email on.
Patient-facing digital
Appointment booking, teleconsultation, patient portals and health apps — the surface a stranger can reach without being on the premises.
National digital health integration
Health-ID and record-exchange integrations, which move records outside your perimeter and bring somebody else's identity assertions inside it.
Pharmacy, billing and claims
The financial half of the estate, carrying payer integrations and the personal and payment data that come with them.
The obligations
What binds an Indian healthcare provider
There is no single healthcare cyber instrument. What applies arrives from three directions at once, and one of them applies to every organisation in the country.
| Source | What it requires of you | Why it is missed |
|---|---|---|
| CERT-In Directions, 2022 | Reporting of specified cyber incidents within six hours of noticing, synchronised system clocks, and retention of logs within India for 180 days. | They apply to every organisation in the country, not to a regulated subset, so nobody receives a letter telling them they are in scope. |
| Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 | Obligations as a data fiduciary over personal data, including breach notification, purpose limitation and the consent architecture behind processing. | Health data is among the most sensitive categories a fiduciary can hold, and hospitals hold it for people who never had a meaningful choice about providing it. |
| National digital health participation | The security and privacy conditions attached to participating in national health-record exchange, which bind you to how you handle records that arrive from elsewhere. | Integration is usually driven by a service or product team, and the security conditions travel with the integration rather than with the compliance function. |
| Contractual and accreditation demands | Payer, insurer, corporate-client and accreditation requirements — increasingly including evidence of independent testing. | These arrive as questionnaires rather than regulation, and they are frequently the strictest requirement an organisation is actually held to. |
CERT-In Directions, 2022
- What it requires of you
- Reporting of specified cyber incidents within six hours of noticing, synchronised system clocks, and retention of logs within India for 180 days.
- Why it is missed
- They apply to every organisation in the country, not to a regulated subset, so nobody receives a letter telling them they are in scope.
Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023
- What it requires of you
- Obligations as a data fiduciary over personal data, including breach notification, purpose limitation and the consent architecture behind processing.
- Why it is missed
- Health data is among the most sensitive categories a fiduciary can hold, and hospitals hold it for people who never had a meaningful choice about providing it.
National digital health participation
- What it requires of you
- The security and privacy conditions attached to participating in national health-record exchange, which bind you to how you handle records that arrive from elsewhere.
- Why it is missed
- Integration is usually driven by a service or product team, and the security conditions travel with the integration rather than with the compliance function.
Contractual and accreditation demands
- What it requires of you
- Payer, insurer, corporate-client and accreditation requirements — increasingly including evidence of independent testing.
- Why it is missed
- These arrive as questionnaires rather than regulation, and they are frequently the strictest requirement an organisation is actually held to.
How to approach it
Establish reachability before you count vulnerabilities
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First
Find what is on the network
Passive discovery, not active scanning, against clinical segments. The inventory is almost always wrong in the direction of more devices than anyone expected.
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Then
Establish what reaches what
Segmentation is the control that actually holds here, because patching frequently is not available. Test whether the boundary between clinical and corporate exists in practice.
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Then
Test the reachable perimeter properly
Patient portals, booking, teleconsultation and every integration exposed to the internet get a full assessment — these carry no clinical-availability constraint and are where a stranger starts.
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Finally
Report against what can be acted on
An unpatchable device is a segmentation and monitoring finding, not a patching one. A report that says otherwise is filed and not actioned, which helps nobody.
Services
Recommended Services for Healthcare
HIPAA, DPDP Act, and IRDAI-aligned security for healthcare organisations
Web Application Penetration Testing
Security testing for patient portals, EMR/EHR systems, telemedicine platforms, and hospital management applications.
Learn More →Mobile Application Security Testing
iOS and Android security for patient apps, health tracking, pharmacy delivery, and teleconsultation applications.
Learn More →API Security Testing
FHIR, HL7, and custom API security testing for health data exchange, lab integrations, and insurance claim APIs.
Learn More →Cloud Security Assessment
HIPAA-compliant cloud posture review for health data storage, PHI processing, and disaster recovery environments.
Learn More →Secure Code Review
Code-level analysis for healthcare applications including medical device software and clinical decision support systems.
Learn More →Compliance
Frameworks that matter to Healthcare
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you test without disrupting clinical systems?
Yes, and the method changes to make that true rather than the scope shrinking to avoid it. Clinical segments are approached with passive discovery and traffic analysis, with any active work confined to maintenance windows and to devices confirmed out of clinical use. The internet-facing estate — portals, booking, teleconsultation, integrations — carries no such constraint and gets a full assessment. What we will not do is run active testing against a device in clinical use because the scope document says the subnet is in scope.
Most of our medical devices cannot be patched. What is the point of testing them?
To establish what an unpatchable device can actually reach, and what reaches it. That converts an unfixable vulnerability list into a segmentation and monitoring programme, which is actionable. It also produces the evidence needed when a payer, insurer or accreditation body asks how a known-vulnerable device is controlled — an answer that says "it is isolated to this segment and monitored for this behaviour" is one that survives the follow-up question.
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