Brian Montgomery, Expert Security Engineer, Altera Digital HealthBeing an avid soccer fan, player, and coach, I’ve heard countless times that “the best defense is a good offense.” As a cybersecurity professional, the concept of taking active steps to improve your team’s position resonates. However, cybersecurity programs within and outside the healthcare industry typically focus on reactive approaches. The stakes are too high in healthcare to wait for a hacker to strike your organization, and meanwhile, the scale and scope of cyberattacks continue to grow. In 2023, more than 700 healthcare data breaches affected 133 million people in the U.S. The underutilized concept of offensive cybersecurity offers practical solutions when healthcare organizations understand and adopt this approach.What does offensive cybersecurity entail?Organizations that look for vulnerabilities in their systems before cyber threats can exploit them use offensive cybersecurity, a specialization within the cybersecurity umbrella. These different probing and testing methods mimic how real malicious actors would compromise an organization.Vulnerability assessments, one type of offensive cybersecurity test, help organizations identify points of weakness attackers could exploit. To conduct these tests, organizations use scanning software and services to evaluate how their assets stack up against any known security vulnerabilities. Considered another layer on top of vulnerability assessments, penetration testing (also known as “pen testing”) determines the extent of exploitable detected vulnerabilities, such as weak encryption or missing patches, and can show the impact of these weaknesses if exploited by attackers.“Red teaming” is another type of offensive cybersecurity and ranks as the most involved of these methods

Altera closes USD 9M seed funding round.

ORLANDO, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Altera Digital Health (HIMSS booth #2546), a global health IT leader, today announced the development of Paragon Denali, an electronic health record (EHR) natively deployed in the cloud, specifically designed for rural, critical access and community hospitals. Built on Microsoft Azure, the Altera EHR system will bring cloud-capable features and containerized services to healthcare organizations, enabling faster, more informed care decisions and greater financial and operational efficiencies. Paragon Denali is targeted to be generally available by the end of 2024. From rising labor and supply costs to shrinking reimbursements, hundreds of U.S. hospitals are at risk of closure. Altera, a longtime partner of Microsoft, recognized that offering Paragon in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model would give smaller hospitals a single platform to manage clinical and financial data without further straining their staff, resources and budgets