Industries / Healthcare
Healthcare cybersecurity
for organisations that
cannot afford downtime.
Healthcare is now the most targeted sector for ransomware in Australia. Patient records are worth more than credit cards on the dark web, clinical systems run on legacy infrastructure, and operational pressure means security often comes second to patient care. Cliffside helps healthcare organisations fix that equation.
We work with hospitals, health insurers, pathology providers, aged care operators, and digital health platforms across Australia. Our approach starts with understanding how your clinical and administrative environments actually work -- not imposing a generic security framework that ignores the reality of 24/7 healthcare operations.
The challenge
Healthcare's security problem is structural, not just technical.
Healthcare organisations face a combination of factors that make them uniquely vulnerable. Legacy clinical systems that cannot be easily patched. Medical devices connected to hospital networks with minimal security controls. High staff turnover and clinicians who need fast access to patient data, not multi-step authentication. Budget constraints that force security to compete with direct patient care for funding.
The result is an environment where attackers know the pressure to restore operations is immense -- which is exactly why ransomware operators target healthcare disproportionately.
- Legacy clinical systems running unsupported operating systems that cannot be patched without vendor involvement
- Connected medical devices -- infusion pumps, imaging systems, patient monitors -- with minimal built-in security
- Data sensitivity -- health records contain identity, medical, financial, and insurance data in a single record
Compliance
Navigating Australia's healthcare regulatory landscape.
Australian healthcare organisations operate under multiple overlapping regulatory obligations. The Privacy Act 1988 and Australian Privacy Principles govern how personal information is collected, used, and disclosed. The My Health Records Act 2012 imposes specific obligations around access to and security of My Health Record data. The Notifiable Data Breaches scheme requires reporting eligible breaches within 30 days.
For hospitals and health services classified as critical infrastructure, the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018 (SOCI Act) adds further requirements including risk management programmes, incident reporting within 12 hours, and potential government assistance measures during significant cyber incidents.
We help healthcare organisations understand which obligations apply to them specifically and build security programmes that satisfy regulators without creating clinical workflow friction.
Testing
Security testing that accounts for clinical environments.
Standard penetration testing methodologies can be dangerous in healthcare environments where network disruption could affect patient care. Our testing approach is designed for clinical settings -- we scope engagements to avoid impacting critical medical systems while still identifying the vulnerabilities that matter.
This includes network segmentation assessments to verify that clinical, administrative, and guest networks are properly isolated. We test whether an attacker who compromises an administrative workstation can reach medical device networks or patient record systems.
Awareness
Clinical staff are not security specialists. That is the point.
Healthcare phishing attacks exploit urgency, authority, and the fact that clinical staff are trained to respond quickly to requests -- exactly the behaviour attackers target. Generic security awareness training that was designed for corporate office workers does not address the specific social engineering techniques used against healthcare organisations.
We design awareness programmes that account for clinical workflows, shift patterns, and the reality that a nurse receiving a phishing email during a busy ED shift is in a fundamentally different risk context than an accountant at a desk.
Cloud and digital health
Telehealth, cloud migration, and the expanding attack surface.
The acceleration of telehealth, cloud-based patient management systems, and digital health platforms has expanded the healthcare attack surface significantly. Cloud migration offers genuine benefits for healthcare organisations -- but only if the security architecture is designed before the migration, not retrofitted afterwards.
We help healthcare organisations assess the security implications of cloud adoption, design appropriate access controls for telehealth platforms, and ensure that patient data in cloud environments meets the same protection standards as on-premises systems.
Strategy
Security programmes designed around patient care, not against it.
The most common reason healthcare security programmes fail is that they create friction with clinical workflows. Security controls that slow down patient care will be circumvented -- not out of malice, but out of necessity. A security programme that clinicians work around is worse than no programme at all, because it creates a false sense of compliance.
We design security strategies that account for clinical reality. That means controls which are appropriate to the risk, authentication approaches that work for shift-based clinical staff, and incident response plans that prioritise patient safety alongside data protection.