HIPAA Vulnerability Compliance with Acunetix

If you’re a healthcare organization storing healthcare records, insurance information, social security numbers, and other personal information, you’re likely required to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) security standards. In order to prevent data breaches and maintain protected health information, you’ll need an automatic web application vulnerability scanning and risk analysis programme with the ability to produce audit ready reports. Obtaining the necessary expertise to achieve and maintain compliance, perform manual penetration testing as well as process the results from manual vulnerability assessment engagements can be challenging and expensive for organizations of any size. With built-in web application vulnerability scanning, vulnerability management, web application firewall (WAF) security rule integrations, issue tracker integrations and audit-ready compliance reports, Acunetix gives healthcare providers the tools you need to reach HIPAA compliance readiness. Acunetix is a best of breed automated web vulnerability scanner that helps you identify web application vulnerabilities before cyber criminals do. Acunetix can scan hundreds of web applications for thousands of vulnerabilities and missing information security controls, including HIPAA vulnerabilities, quickly and with the lowest false positive rate in the industry. Furthermore, by supporting a vast array of technologies such as JavaScript and HTML5, Acunetix is capable of finding even the hardest-to-discover technical vulnerabilities.

With web technologies moving at such a rapid pace, modern websites are full of complexities. To such an extent, many legacy vulnerability scanners designed to scan websites built a decade ago don’t meet the needs of the modern web and therefore can’t scan large and complex web applications quickly and accurately. With a re-engineered core and a highly optimized crawler, every inch of Acunetix is tuned for speed, efficiency, and accuracy, allowing you to meet HIPAA regulations even in the largest and most complex of web applications without breaking a sweat or needing security experts on staff. What’s more, with Acunetix, it’s possible to throttle the speed at which a scan runs, ensuring that even high-traffic sites can be scanned without affecting their performance. You can also schedule HIPAA vulnerability compliance scans to run at specific times of a day, week, or month, or even define you own custom schedule. You also have the option of running scans on continuous basis with Acunetix only running a high-level scan every day of the week, with a full HIPAA compliance scan run once a week. This ensures that any new vulnerabilities that may have been introduced in-between full scans get picked up by Acunetix immediately.

With built-in reports for HIPAA and other common compliance standards such as PCI DSS, Acunetix enables you to quickly and easily conduct daily security reviews, satisfy management and auditor requests, and protect your organization against costly penalties. Additionally, Acunetix also allows users to export discovered vulnerabilities to issue trackers such as Atlassian Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Mantis, Bugzilla, and Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS). One of the biggest issues with conventional web vulnerability scanners is that they simply report a list of vulnerabilities after a scan is complete. Acunetix takes a different approach in that once a vulnerability is found during a scan, it is automatically cataloged and assigned a status of Open. After the vulnerability gets fixed, Acunetix may be used to re-test the vulnerability to make sure it’s properly fixed, and then automatically marks it as Fixed, allowing you to easily and accurately report on remediation progress to management, auditors, and other stakeholders quickly, accurately and, most importantly, from one centralized location. All of this information is available at a glance in the Acunetix dashboard and thanks to multi-user, multi-role capabilities, users can only see what they’re meant to. With Acunetix, you will be able to focus on web security instead of needing to become a compliance expert.

Frequently asked questions

What is HIPAA?

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a US government act that came into force in 1996. One of the main reasons for this act was to help protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in healthcare from fraud and theft. In 2003, the final Security Rule was added to the act, which includes the requirement for technical safeguards of healthcare PII.

Who does HIPAA apply to?

HIPAA applies to US healthcare organizations that store and transmit any health data electronically. The act includes a definition of HIPAA covered entities (45 CFR 160.103) that must be HIPAA-compliant or face penalties. HIPAA audits are conducted periodically by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR).

Learn more about HIPAA and its requirements.

Does HIPAA require vulnerability scans?

The HIPAA security rule does not specifically mention vulnerability scans or penetration tests. However, to comply with the security rule, Health and Human Services require a technical vulnerability assessment of all the IT assets, including all web and network assets. Therefore, to comply with HIPAA, you must regularly use a vulnerability scanner to assess the security of your assets.

Learn about HIPAA vulnerability scan requirements.

How can Acunetix help with HIPAA compliance?

The Acunetix HIPAA report is a valuable tool for assessing the compliance of your web security measures continuously. This report organizes issues discovered by Acunetix according to HIPAA classification. The HIPAA report is available as a standard Acunetix report along with many other types of compliance reports.

Learn more about Acunetix reporting.