Protecting Critical Healthcare Data Requires Strong Leadership

Healthcare remains a high-value target for hackers. According to the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights, the sector faced a surge of breaches affecting over 179 million individuals for 588 reported breaches in 2024.

Comprehensive healthcare records hold significant value on the dark web, frequently selling for hundreds of dollars, because they can grant access to expensive medical benefits, devices, and services. According to an article written for The National Association of Healthcare Access Management titled The Value of Personal Medical Information: Protecting against Data Breaches by Laurie Zabel, “Personal medical data is said to be more than ten times as valuable as credit card information. PHI has such a high value because it contains highly sensitive information, such as social security numbers, birth dates, addresses, credit card numbers, telephone numbers and medical conditions.”

Challenges and Best Practices

Protecting personal health data is challenging because it is a dispersed industry including large insurance companies, hospitals and healthcare networks, all the way down to small doctors offices. The value of health data means it will continue to be a prime target for hackers and we should expect even more attacks in 2025.

Consistent best practices and improved regulatory requirements are needed to solve the increasing rate of attacks. The comment period closed last month for HIPAA’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to strengthen cybersecurity protections for electronic protected health information (ePHI). The update proposes a number of policy updates, including requiring encryption at rest and in transit, the deployment of anti-malware protection, and the use of multi-factor authentication. This effort is an important step in improving the cybersecurity posture of covered health care entities. A number of bills were also introduced last year in Congress, including the Health Care Cybersecurity and Resiliency Act of 2024, by the current Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee Bill Cassidy (R-LA).

Upcoming Legislation

The legislation has a number of important cybersecurity updates addressing the cyber workforce, rural communities and includes potential grant funding to enhance cybersecurity in health care entities. A key policy focus in the bill is to require the Secretary of HHS to update required security standards for covered entities and business associates, including the adoption of multi-factor authentication or successor technologies. This is an important step, but going further in this legislation and the proposed HIPAA security update to follow NIST guidance in SP 800-63 and OMB M22-09 to move to passwordless authentication would be even better. This would substantially increase the protection of health records and further reduce the risk of successful attacks like phishing. To date, this legislation has not been introduced in the current Congress. We will have to wait for the next steps in the regulatory process for HIPAA cybersecurity protection.

The threat to healthcare records and systems is ongoing, making it crucial to focus on protecting healthcare data and enhancing the overall cybersecurity of the healthcare system. We are at a critical juncture, and prioritizing this issue within the Administration and Congress is essential.

Nok Nok Protecting Critical Healthcare Data

Nok Nok is a founding member of the FIDO Alliance and a global leader in passwordless authentication, making it easy for organizations to protect data and move away from passwords, adopting safer, faster ways for users to log in.

The Nok Nok platform helps organizations manage the complexity when deploying passkeys—modern, passwordless credentials—across all devices and platforms. This means users can log in with biometrics or use device-based authentication, eliminating passwords. Nok Nok’s future-proof platform is purpose-built to support everything from mobile banking, healthcare systems, government agencies, to IoT devices and beyond.

Key Benefits of Nok Nok:

Passwordless Authentication: Replace passwords with passkeys and biometrics, making logins safer and easier for everyone.
Frictionless User Experience: Users enjoy faster sign-up and sign-in, with success rates as high as 99.5% and sign-in speeds up to twice as fast as traditional methods.
Integration: Nok Nok’s robust SDK and API’s ensure integration into any app/service to ensure compatibility within even the most complex environment.
Industry Certifications: Nok Nok helps organizations meet strict industry standards, including FIDO, FedRAMP High, and DoD Impact Level 5 (IL5) and more.
Global Scale: Trusted by banks, telecoms, and enterprises worldwide, Nok Nok delivers proven, scalable authentication for millions of users.

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“Transactions using mobile devices are rapidly spreading and it is essential to support both usability and security. By combining Hitachi’s abundant system development capabilities and know-how in the financial system and security related fields, and Nok Nok’s globally deployed and proven FIDO certified products, we achieved this compatibility, which led to this adoption.”

– Mr. Nobuo Nagaarashi, General Manager, Financial Information Systems 1st Division, Hitachi, Ltd.

The M in MUFG stands for Mitsubishi, which is a combination of the words mitsu and hishi. Mitsu means three. Hishi means water chestnut, and the word denotes a rhombus or diamond shape. In partnership with Hitachi, MUFG has enabled passwordless authentication solutions across many of the bank’s apps and services.

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“As an early adopter of FIDO, we’ve seen significant business benefits and are completely on board with continuing to leverage the latest FIDO innovations with our partner, Nok Nok.”

– Rakan Khalid, Group Product Manager, Identity.

Intuit has delivered passwordless authentication across mobile applications and devices using Nok Nok’s S3 Suite. The results have reduced customer friction in their Intuit application experience.

Read The Nok Nok Intuit Case Study

Watch the FIDO Alliance Webinar: The Right Mix

Watch Marcio Mello discuss Intuit’s Nok Nok implementation at Identiverse 2019:

“DOCOMO is a worldwide innovator in providing its millions of customers with simple and strong authentication backed by a standards-based approach.”

– Phillip Dunkelberger, President & CEO of Nok Nok Labs.

As one of Nok Nok’s earliest customers, NTT DOCOMO became the first carrier to offer a billing system that is enabled by FIDO, the first to offer a federated Identity system integrated FIDO, and was the first to offer a mobile device that authenticates via the iris biometric modality.

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“Traditionally, one of the biggest challenges of authentication systems has been to balance security with user experience. Due to the FIDO standard, we are confident that both elements work together seamlessly to provide customers with the highest security standards, along with a transparent and agile user experience.”

– Juan Francisco Losa, Global Technology & Information Security Officer.

Nok Nok partnered with banking leader, BBVA to improve the security and user experience of the bank’s mobile banking services through state-of-the-art biometric capabilities.

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“We can no longer rely on passwords for our financial or other sensitive transactions as they are weak, forgotten and easily hacked. We are very pleased with SoftBank’s decision to choose our standards-based authentication platform for their millions of customers.”

– Phillip Dunkelberger, President & CEO of Nok Nok Labs.

Millions of SoftBank’s mobile subscribers now have the ability to use biometrics for authentication through the mobile application “My SoftBank Plus”. With this implementation, SoftBank’s mobile users access data with the My SoftBank service using biometrics for a frictionless, simple and fast authentication experience.

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“Aflac is the first Japanese insurance provider to deploy a FIDO-certified solution, and we would like to continue collaborating with Nok Nok Labs to introduce it to banks, insurance industry and other industries.”

– Michihiko Ejiri, VP, Head of Portal Service Division, Service Technology Unit, Fujitsu Limited.

With the Nok Nok S3 Suite, Fujitsu has provided Aflac customers with strong authentication to their mobile claims payment application using any biometrics on their iOS and Android devices. The solution also provides Aflac and their customers with a scalable method to authenticate users that is interoperable with their existing security environments and reduces or eliminates the reliance on usernames and passwords.

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“For our customers, we only use the most secure products on the market that meet their requirements. Nok Nok perfectly aligns within our product portfolio and we are proud of the very trusted partnership.”

– Lukas Praml, CEO of YOUNIQX.

YOUNIQX Identity AG, the award-winning subsidiary of the Austrian State Printing House (OeSD) and Nok Nok partnered to deliver a electronic identity system (eID) for the citizens of the country of Liechtenstein. This deployment represents the first time that Nok Nok’s FIDO platform has been used to deliver an eID.

FUN FACT
As of 2009 Liechtenstein’s per capita income was $139,100, the highest of any country in the world.

Learn How FIDO Supports EIDAS Regulation

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“Nok Nok’s state-of-the-art, standards-based platform will deliver a tremendous user experience,”

– Steve Bell, Chief Technology Officer at Gallagher

When a horse called Joe took too much of a liking to using a car as a scratching post, owner Bill Gallagher Sr. devised a cunning electrical circuit that delivered a shock whenever the horse rocked the vehicle, and in doing so created a company. Today, with passwordless authentication from Nok Nok, Gallagher is leading the IoT industry with innovative solutions that work in your office and in the outback.

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“Our Forgot Password flows were running at about 65%. After we rolled out FIDO by Nok Nok, our forgot passwords dropped to 7%.”

Michael Engan, T-Mobile

Using the Nok Nok S3 Suite, T-Mobile has become a leader in carrier adoption of passwordless authentication. Their solutions have reduced forgotten passwords and dramatically improved customer satisfaction.

Watch Michael Engan from T-Mobile talk about their implementation of Nok Nok’s S3 Authentication Suite at Identiverse 2019.

Protecting Critical Healthcare Data Requires Strong Leadership