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Cybersecurity authorities in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States today urged companies that deliver, operate or manage information and communications technology services and their customers to implement certain best practices to secure sensitive data, citing a recent increase in malicious cyber activity targeting these Managed Service Providers to gain access to customers’ networks. 

John Riggi, AHA’s national advisor for cybersecurity and risk, said, “Sophisticated cyber actors continue to target strategic nodes within health care and other sectors to gain broad access to individual organizations. Think of this as the ‘hub and spoke’ targeting strategy. If they gain access to the ‘hub’ (MSP) they gain access to all the ‘spokes’ (customers). This is a highly effective strategy, which has been used in the past by state-sponsored actors related to the governments of China and Russia. The Chinese government has been historically focused on using this methodology for cyber espionage campaigns. The Russian government and their military intelligence services have used this methodology in the past to gain access to networks for espionage and to pre-position for potential future disruptive or destructive malware attacks. This threat also highlights the need for robust third-party risk management programs, which fully identify and evaluate the increased cyber risk organizations may incur by outsourcing of services and technology.”