Jefferson Health Invests in ‘Digital Fingerprinting’ Solution Vendor
Philadelphia-based Jefferson Health and Thomas Jefferson University have made an investment in a Baltimore-based cybersecurity company called Terbium Labs.
Although they didn’t disclose the amount of the investment, Terbium said it would use the new funding from Jefferson to accelerate product development of its Matchlight solution, which enables automated and secure monitoring of protected health information, employee records, and confidential medical research.
Jefferson and Terbium noted that cybercriminals continuing to exploit the healthcare industry during the global pandemic, with research shows a 45 percent increase in cyberattacks since November of 2020 against the healthcare sector. Attack vectors include distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, social engineering, botnets, phishing, and ransomware.
"To help protect our PHI and PII [personally identifiable information], we needed a secure and proactive solution, one that can integrate into our existing systems — ranging from our HR management platform to our research data management platform to our patient portal — ensuring we are monitoring all of our valuable assets, while staying compliant with regulations tied to this type of data,” said Mark Odom, vice president and CISO at Thomas Jefferson University & Jefferson Health, in a statement. “With its digital fingerprinting technology, Terbium's Matchlight is the only solution on the market that has the ability to legally handle our most critical data. With the strategic investment, we are excited to collaborate with Terbium Labs in the development of Matchlight's third-party integrations, which will allow us to automate the fingerprinting process with our key systems.”
After being introduced to the Matchlight solution, and supportive of its potential, Odom approached Jefferson's Strategic Ventures group about exploring something more strategic than simply a vendor-customer relationship. "Mark approached us and said not only is this a really interesting solution, but we believe we can help them," said Jason Bowne, vice president of investments, in a statement. "Both sides were excited to engage in something deeper, and this was exciting for our office because while we receive immense support from our IS&T [information systems and technology] colleagues, this is our first strategic investment into digital security and a terrific opportunity to allow them front and center, leveraging IS&T's subject matter expertise."
Matchlight's patented digital fingerprinting technology creates a one-way digital signature of any type of data, enabling Jefferson to automatically ingest and monitor its sensitive information without revealing it to anyone – not even Terbium. Matchlight helps the Thomas Jefferson University & Jefferson Health security teams to continuously evaluate the organization's risk profile, including where its data can be found across the open, deep, and dark web, how its risk evolves over time, and what can be done to remediate any exposure.
