HIPAA
Summary
Regulation: Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
Abbreviation: HIPAA
Governs these parties: all organizations that: receive payment for their services and transmit personal or health information for the purposes of treatment, operations, billing, or insurance coverage
Enforced by: the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
Details
HIPAA is a series of regulatory standards that outline the lawful use and disclosure of protected health information (PHI). PHI includes private information such as past, present, or future physical or mental health or conditions, health care, past, present, or future payments for health care, and personal identifying information such as birthdates, social security numbers, and biometric information. Included in the regulations is the requirement for the security of electronically protected health information (e-PHI), which is all private data that is created, received, maintained, or transmitted in electronic form.
The rest of this document is designed to help our community understand HIPAA better by outlining the following information.
How this regulation relates to cybersecurity
HIPAA comprises privacy, security, and breach notification rules. The Security Rule establishes a national set of security standards for protecting certain health information that is held or transferred in electronic form. Much of the technical safeguards described are cybersecurity guardrails, and as such require that your electronic data be monitored and protected by a security platform.
The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) offers an audit protocol that can be used as a roadmap when planning and ensuring your and your customer's data is protected.
How Coro handles compliance for you
At Coro, we've done the research thoroughly and regularly track updates to the regulation in order to ensure that you are implementing best practices in the areas we cover when we're protecting your systems.
The following table outlines the requirements described by HIPAA that Coro implements in conjunction with Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
Disclaimer
This table does not guarantee that your organization is compliant with these regulations. As a best practice, seek assistance from a certified auditor when completing your analysis.
| Category | Requirement | How Coro does it |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud Security & Privacy | Malware and ransomware injection | Detects and remediates malware and ransomware files in cloud drives |
| Cloud app account takeover | Monitors access to cloud apps and user/admin activities on them | |
| Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) | Enforces multi-factor authentication on cloud app access | |
| Audit and activity logs | Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing | |
| Email Security & Privacy | Generic and spear phishing | Detects and remediates social engineering attacks based on email content analysis |
| Identity spoofing | Detects and remediates social engineering attacks based on adaptive identity monitoring | |
| Malware and ransomware injection | Detects and remediates malware and ransomware in email attachments | |
| Embedded links to malicious URLs | Detects and remediates embedded links to malicious servers | |
| DLP over outgoing/incoming email | Encrypts emails before they are sent, which are then decrypted by their recipients at the other end. | |
| Encryption of email during transmission | Encrypts email during transit between the sender and the recipient | |
| Business email compromise (BEC) | Scans business email, detects and protects against social engineering attacks | |
| Audit and activity logs | Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing | |
| Endpoint Security & Privacy | Antivirus (AV) | Detects and remediates files with high-risk content based on their signatures |
| ATP (NGAV) | Detects and remediates processes exhibiting high-risk behaviors with behavioral analysis | |
| Device security posture | Detects security vulnerabilities on endpoint devices and enforces device security posture | |
| Data recovery | Stores local snapshots of data | |
| EDR | Enables post-breach analysis of endpoint activities across the organization | |
| DLP on endpoint devices | Provides data loss prevention (DLP) for business-sensitive data and data defined as sensitive by regulations | |
| Audit and activity logs | Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing | |
| Data Governance | Data distribution governance and role management | Provides data loss prevention (DLP) for data defined as sensitive by regulations |
| Security and business-specific data monitoring | Monitors for sensitive data according to business and security best practices, including passwords, certificates, source code, proprietary data, etc. | |
| PHI monitoring | Monitors PHI (also: personal health information) that healthcare professionals collect to identify an individual and determine appropriate care | |
| Audit and activity logs | Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing |