The Inspector General of the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department has confirmed that an investigation is underway into the controversy of the Healthcare Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (HCCIC) and more details will be revealed after the completion of the inquiry.
Going further into details, in September last year the cyber centers Director Maggie Amato and the department’s Deputy Chief Information Officer Leo Scanlon were accused of accepting inappropriate gifts from Cybersecurity companies that later bagged multi-million dollar contracts with the agency.
An investigation was launched on both the officers in October’17. But later the two were reassigned to duty following a letter from the Senate which stated that they were not part of the investigation.
In February this year, the controversy was refueled after Chris Wlaschin; the Chief Information Security Officer was assigned the duty to oversee the HCCIC reassignment of Scanlon and Amato.
Mr. Wlaschin admitted that some kind of discrepancies did take place while assigning the contracts. But failed to disclose further information as the inquiry was still underway.
Surprisingly, due to personal reasons, Wlaschin resigned to his designation and will be replaced by Janet Vogel, a senior Federal IT officer who is currently holding the designation of Deputy Chief Information Officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Janet Vogel has confirmed that a new inquiry will be made into this whole saga and until then the media has to avoid any kind of speculation.
Note 1- Some industry officials and lawmakers say that HCCIC which shares cyber threat info between government and the healthcare sector simply duplicates the work carried out by Homeland Security Department and the healthcare industry.
Note 2-But the sympathizers of HCCIC say that the cyber center helps small healthcare organizations receive cyber threat alerts in the timely manner that helps them secure their IT assets from hacking campaigns such as phishing attacks. The center is also known to tailor the general government alerts sent by Homeland Security to a more meaningful content that helps secure the healthcare sector from attacks appearing in cyber landscape.
