Rowan College To Discuss Cyber Security, Healthcare Wednesday

BURLINGTON COUNTY, NJ — As technology evolves, cybersecurity breaches become increasingly sophisticated, and the healthcare sector is particularly susceptible to attacks because so much valuable information is attached to people’s health.

Rowan College at Burlington County will discuss data protection during its next Facebook Live Town Hall at 6 p.m. Wednesday. A panel will discuss how organizations protect the healthcare industry from cyber-attacks, why this work is so important and how to get a cybersecurity degree from Rowan College at Burlington County.

The panel includes Sensato CEO John Gomez; Deborah Heart and Lung Center CIO and Burlington County Workforce Development Board Member Richard Temple; RCBC Information Technology instructor Paul Warner; and RCBC 2020 valedictorian and 3+1 cybersecurity graduate Shanni Prutchi.

Sensato, a top-500 cybersecurity company, uses military-inspired approaches to protect organizations from cybersecurity breaches. They’re also the first cybersecurity firm specifically focused on safeguarding hospital information systems.

“We work with organizations like the FDA and the Department of Homeland Security to monitor hospital networks, perform threat analysis, implement forensics review and conduct incident response,” Gomez said. “We’ve built our own software platform to deploy on hospitals’ systems to determine nefarious activity and anomalous behaviors across individual networks.”

Deborah Heart and Lung Center is one of Sensato’s clients.

“There’s been much more ransomware happening across the industry,” Temple said. “These are sharp, coordinated attacks with a great deal of sophistication, and they’re real. It’s gotten worse, but I also think that the tools and resources from Sensato that may not have been available a few years ago are helping to mitigate the problem. As the hackers have gotten more sophisticated, the defenses have become more sophisticated and vital.”

Fighting cybercrime will cost global businesses over $6 trillion per year, and there will be 3.5 million unfilled security jobs this year, according to Cybersecurity Ventures.

“Being on the receiving end of an attack and being able to defend against it and do the forensics work — those are things that RCBC prepared me for,” Prutchi recalled. “One of my favorite classes was the digital forensics class, and I learned so many practical skills. You can’t effectively defend if you didn’t know the method of attack to begin with.”

Rowan College at Burlington County Information Technology instructor Paul Warner also emphasized how the college’s program prepares students for real-world situations.

“We are constantly working on improving our cybersecurity program,” Warner said. “Our students can actually perform tasks in a live environment and understand how compliance works. They learn how to hack into systems and learn about web interfacing. When a student earns their degree with us, for me, as an instructor, I feel that they can step into an environment and perform tasks with a limited amount of training.”