RESTON, Va., April 20, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Carahsoft Technology Corp., The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider®, today announced that Akamai’s Enterprise Threat Protector (ETP) has been selected by the Center for Internet Security® (CIS®) to provide a carrier-grade recursive Domain Name System (DNS) through CIS’ Malicious Domain Name Blocking and Reporting (MDBR) program to private hospitals at no cost.
MDBR is fully funded by a $1 million investment from CIS as a complement to a similar federally funded pilot program CIS manages for public hospitals that are members of the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center® (MS-ISAC®). Akamai’s ETP provides an additional layer of cybersecurity protection that is proven, effective and easy for organizations to deploy.
The technology, which is built on the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform, proactively prevents enterprises, workers and systems from connecting to harmful web domains, helping to limit infections related to known malware, ransomware, phishing and other cyber threats. This capability can block the vast majority of ransomware infections just by preventing the initial outreach to a ransomware delivery domain.
Ransomware has emerged as one of the largest cyber threats to U.S. hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic. In October 2020, the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security (DHS), Health and Human Services (HHS), and the FBI issued a joint advisory around an increased and imminent threat of ransomware attacks that could result in data theft and the disruption of healthcare services.
“Today’s threat landscape has increased dramatically in terms of sophistication and scope over the last year, making it all the more important for hospitals to defend their patients, employees and systems,” said Michael Shrader, Vice President of Intelligent and Innovative Solutions at Carahsoft, which provides Akamai ETP to CIS for both its public and private sector hospital programs. “Akamai offers a platform with the right combination of innovative technology, along with the ability to scale quickly that will offer enhanced security for hospitals and help ensure continuity of operations.”
In response to the heightened cyber threat against the healthcare system and the crucial importance of protecting and maintaining continuity of patient care and operations, CIS is providing this service immediately at no cost to a wide range of U.S.-based healthcare organizations, including independent hospitals; multi-hospital systems; hospital-based integrated health systems; post-acute patient care facilities; and psychiatric, rehabilitation, and other specialty hospitals.
“CIS is offering this defensive solution as part of our mission to make the connected world a safer place,” said Ed Mattison, CIS Executive Vice President, Operations and Security Services. “Our board made the decision to fully fund this program ourselves at no cost, and with no strings attached for hospitals in the U.S. because a powerful, easy to implement solution is critically needed to protect our healthcare system.”
From its inception, CIS reports the following progress:
- As of March 31, 2021, 1,644 U.S. State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial Government organizations were reporting success with Akamai technology through the MS-ISAC MDBR pilot program.
- At the end of March 2021, MDBR had blocked more than 1.2 Billion requests to known bad web domains for public sector members since its inception.
- Participating public healthcare organizations reported a combined total of 216,286 blocked DNS requests from July 2020 to March 2021.
- As of March 31, 2021, 49 U.S. private healthcare organizations, and 15 U.S. public healthcare organizations were using the MDBR program.
- Participating private healthcare organizations reported a combined total of 32.3 Million blocked DNS requests from February 16, 2021 to March 31, 2021.
- The most common blocked activities for public health organizations as of March 2021, involved Malware (96.53%) and Phishing (3.1%).
- The most common blocked activities for private healthcare organizations as of March 2021, were Command & Control (68.83%) and Malware (23.66%).
“The Akamai Enterprise Threat Protector service was designed to provide a quick and simple way for organizations to add an additional layer of proactive security by leveraging our edge platform and real-time threat intelligence based on our unprecedented visibility of DNS traffic,” said Jonathan Morgan, Vice President, Network Security Product Management, Akamai. “The fact that CIS was able to fund this program at no cost to private hospitals is a game changer in helping these organizations to quickly and easily improve their security posture.”
Akamai ETP can be implemented in minutes with a simple change to DNS configuration and without additional hardware or software. It does not interfere with the ongoing operations of the hospital or patient care. The Akamai ETP solution is available through Carahsoft to private and public sector hospitals. For more information, contact the Akamai Team at Carahsoft at (877) 925-2624 or Akamai@carahsoft.com.
To learn more and sign up for CIS’s MDBR service for U.S. private and public hospitals visit: https://www.cisecurity.org/hospitals/.
About Carahsoft
Carahsoft Technology Corp. is The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider®, supporting Public Sector organizations across Federal, State and Local Government agencies and Education and Healthcare markets. As the Master Government Aggregator® for our vendor partners, we deliver solutions for Cybersecurity, MultiCloud, DevSecOps, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Open Source, Customer Experience and more. Working with resellers, systems integrators and consultants, our sales and marketing teams provide industry leading IT products, services and training through hundreds of contract vehicles. Visit us at www.carahsoft.com.
About Akamai
Akamai secures and delivers digital experiences for the world’s largest companies. Akamai’s intelligent edge platform surrounds everything, from the enterprise to the cloud, so customers and their businesses can be fast, smart, and secure. Top brands globally rely on Akamai to help them realize competitive advantage through agile solutions that extend the power of their multi-cloud architectures. Akamai keeps decisions, apps and experiences closer to users than anyone — and attacks and threats far away. Akamai’s portfolio of edge security, web and mobile performance, enterprise access and video delivery solutions is supported by unmatched customer service, analytics and 24/7/365 monitoring. To learn why the world’s top brands trust Akamai, visit www.akamai.com, blogs.akamai.com, or @Akamai on Twitter. You can find our global contact information at www.akamai.com/locations.
About CIS
The Center for Internet Security, Inc. (CIS®) makes the connected world a safer place for people, businesses, and governments. We are a community-driven nonprofit, responsible for the CIS Controls® and CIS Benchmarks™, globally recognized best practices for securing IT systems and data. We lead a global community of IT professionals to continuously refine these standards to proactively safeguard against emerging threats. Our CIS Hardened Images® provide secure, on-demand, scalable computing environments in the cloud. CIS is home to the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center® (MS-ISAC®), the trusted resource for cyber threat prevention, protection, response, and recovery for U.S. State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial (SLTT) government entities, and the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center® (EI-ISAC®), which supports the cybersecurity needs of U.S. elections offices. To learn more, visit CISecurity.org or follow us on Twitter: @CISecurity.
Contacts
Mary Lange
(703) 230-7434
pr@carahsoft.com
Jason Forget
media@cisecurity.org
