Kaspersky provides free cybersecurity products to medical institutions

Amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, organisations are coming forward to offer their services for free. Amazon’s Audible is offering free audiobooks for children, meanwhile, Scribd is offering its books, magazines, audiobooks and documents for free for 30 days. Another company to join this movement is Kaspersky. The multinational cybersecurity and anti-virus provider, is giving its core endpoint security products for free to medical organisations.

Kaspersky claims that data protection at a time like this is extremely essential as medical organisations are under extreme pressure and they have to mobilise all forces during the COVID-19 outbreak. On its blog, it stated that a clinic in the Czech city of Brno had reported a cyberattack just last week. Meanwhile, according to Protocol, cybersecurity staff in hospitals across the US are preparing to avoid imminent ransomware attacks.

To provide cybersecurity protection to medical institutions, Kaspersky is offering the following B2B products for free for 6 months:

Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud Plus (RM2,950/year)– a cloud version of the solution for workstations that protects your business without placing additional load on IT resources

Kaspersky Security for Microsoft Office 365 (RM715/year) – comprehensive protection for Microsoft Office 365 collaboration services

Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business Advanced (RM3,980/year) – Kaspersky’s main solution for protecting workstations and servers

Kaspersky Hybrid Cloud Security – a product that allows you to secure virtual and cloud environments.

Kaspersky said that hospitals and medical institutions need to ensure the stability of their medical equipment while data needs to be constantly available for medical personnel. Besides this, healthcare institutions are also required to protect the privacy of their patients’ critical information.

Kaspersky has also come up with a set of guidelines for medical institutions to follow and implement. First thing is to schedule basic security awareness education for both medical personnel and administration employees. This includes essential practices such as passwords, accounts, email security, use of USB devices, PC security and safe web browsing. Kaspersky wants medical institutions to explain to its staff that there is an increasing risk of cyberthreats for healthcare IT systems.

Besides that, it is also important to check the hospital’s protection solution, to make sure it is up to date, configured properly and covers all employees’ devices. Installing a firewall can also protect the institution from threats coming from the internet. Kaspersky claims that the security protocol in place should also give protection against ransomware as it is one of the common threats for medical organisations.

In addition, it is important to properly configure and update devices such as ventilators and protocols must be in place for the arrival of any new devices to ensure quick installation and configuration. Kaspersky also advises that IT services in a hospital should pay special attention to adding protection to the new devices that are added. It claims that it is better to have security profiles, policies and licenses in advance to just add them to new devices when needed.

Lastly, Kaspersky says that it is important to ensure that the current security solution enables the purchasing of enough licenses for the increasing number of devices. For more information on how to obtain the free licenses, representatives of medical organisations can contact local resellers or a local Kaspersky office directly.